Raminder Singh Kahlon (left) and Abdul ‘Alex’ Aziz El-Debel leave court at the start of their trial in 2022. Photos: Albert McKnight.
Two men found guilty of conspiring to defraud the Department of Finance have failed in their attempts to appeal their convictions.
In 2022, senior public servant Abdul ‘Alex’ Aziz El-Debel and IT contractor Raminder Singh Kahlon were found guilty at the end of a lengthy ACT Supreme Court jury trial.
They had been charged with conspiring with each other, as well as Gopalakrishnan Suryanarayanan Vilayur, to dishonestly obtain a gain from the Commonwealth between March 2019 and June 2020.
El-Debel and Kahlon were both sentenced to three-and-a-half year’s jail to be served via an intensive corrections order (ICO), which is a community-based sentence.
Vilayur did not face trial alongside the others and instead pleaded guilty to his charge before he was also sentenced to an ICO last year.
Meanwhile, El-Debel and Kahlon launched an appeal against their convictions.
They argued the guilty verdicts were unreasonable or unable to be supported by the evidence, as well as that the prosecution failed to properly particularise its case.
But on Wednesday (17 July), the three-judge ACT Court of Appeal unanimously dismissed their appeal.
In a published summary of the court’s decision, the judges said the pair had been engaged by the Department of Finance to assist in the delivery of IT projects.
Kahlon and Vilayur also owned and operated labour hire companies, Algoram and New Horizons Business Solutions respectively, which would submit candidates to the department for hiring.
At trial, prosecutors claimed these two conspired with El-Debel, who was a project leader employed by the department, to dishonestly influence the procurement system for the selection of candidates so those put forward by their companies would be successful.
El-Debel would then receive a share of the profits gained by these companies.
Gopalakrishnan Suryanarayanan Vilayur leaves the ACT Courts in 2023. Photo: Albert McKnight.
“The prosecution did not allege that the appellants’ actions had caused a relevant loss to the department,” the appeal judges said in their published decision.
“Rather, the prosecution contended that the gain to New Horizons and Algoram was dishonest because it was to be shared with Mr El-Debel.”
During the appeal, lawyers for El-Debel and Kahlon argued their clients’ actions were not dishonest, because the purpose of their actions was to ensure “the department [had] the best candidates” and to avoid “the consequential losses if substandard resources [were] engaged”.
Prosecutors accepted the actual appointments of the candidates was not improper.
“The candidates were qualified for the job and there is no suggestion they did them other than well,” the trial judge, Justice Michael Elkaim, said.
“The points is simply, according to the Crown, that the candidates … that were put forward by New Horizons and Algoram were put in a better position to obtain the positions than if they had been put forward by other companies or vendors.”
The Court of Appeal was comprised of Chief Justice Lucy McCallum, Justice Belinda Baker and Acting Justice James Bromwich.
The judges ultimately said El-Debel and Kahlon had not established either that the jury’s verdicts were unreasonable or that there was anything inadequate in the particulars provided by the prosecution.
“The whole point of the agreement was to assist candidates from New Horizons and Algoram to be selected via a corruption of the recruitment process,” they said.
“The intent of the agreement was that Algoram and New Horizons candidates would be selected in the recruitment, resulting in payments to Algoram and New Horizons, and these payments would ultimately represent a gain to the appellants and Mr Vilayur.
“The fact that the conspirators acknowledged (even as a part of the agreement) that there was a prospect that, despite their efforts, their candidates might not be selected does not alter the character of the agreement.”
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