A cache of documents has undermined key evidence that was relied upon by Iraqi authorities to jail the Australian engineer Robert Pether, prompting renewed calls for his release.
Pether, a father of three, has meanwhile made allegations that a “confession” statement used against him was mistranslated by a biased employee of Iraq’s central bank before being handed to court.
Pether and his colleague Khaled Saad Zaghloul were jailed in 2021 for five years and fined US$12m over allegations their engineering firm defrauded the Iraqi government during a project to build the Central Bank of Iraq’s new headquarters.
Pether’s employer CME Consulting was accused of continuing to bill the government for the work of a subcontractor, Meinhardt, despite having told Meinhardt to stop work on the project almost immediately after the two firms signed a contract.
Testimony obtained by Guardian Australia shows that a Meinhardt employee told an Iraqi court that CME had told the subcontractor to stop work “three weeks after signing the contract”.
The employee alleged CME then ceased all contact with Meinhardt.
“We left the issue and the accused Khaled Saad Zaghloul did not contact us at all,” the Meinhardt employee’s 11 May 2021 testimony says.
“[We] told [the Central Bank of Iraq] that the accused Khaled Saad Zaghloul informed us in 2017 that the project had stopped so we left the case and that we did not send any of our engineers to the project site and did not provide any engineering consultations.”
But email correspondence reveals extensive contact continued between CME and Meinhardt for months, at odds with what the court was told.
The documents reveal that CME and senior Meinhardt employees exchanged 51 emails between January and July in 2018. The last of these was dated more than six months after the contract, also obtained by the Guardian, was signed.
The Meinhardt employee who authored the prosecution testimony was copied into five CME-Meinhardt emails from May to late June 2018, six months after the time he alleged all contact had ceased.
Among them is a 4 May email from Meinhardt to CME saying “thank you for our discussion and your last week meeting with [name removed], who will lead central bank of Iraq project and will be the main contact of communication”.
A senior executive at Meinhardt was also a recipient of the email – and a total of 11 emails from January to June 2018.
Meinhardt did not respond to detailed questions by the time of publishing.
In a 2021 statement to Nine’s 60 Minutes, Meinhardt said “CME unilaterally elected to perform the Services, without any involvement from Meinhardt at any time” and “CME failed to inform CBI that CME was undertaking the Services without Meinhardt but, on the contrary, CME appears to have used the names of Meinhardt’s staff in order to substantiate CME’s payment applications”.
The Meinhardt employee and author of the prosecution testimony also did not respond to detailed questions.
But the employee has previously defended the accuracy of his testimony. In a 9 September 2021 message obtained by the Guardian, he said: “The testimony I provided was, to the best of my knowledge, complete, accurate and in accordance with the overarching duty that I owe to the court. I therefore completely standby my evidence and no retraction will be made.”
Meanwhile, in an interview with the Guardian, Pether has also alleged that a man who translated a statement used against him during the Iraqi prosecution had a clear conflict. He alleges the translator was an employee of the Central Bank of Iraq.
“I recognised [my] translator as soon as he came into the room. He was known to me since 2016,” Pether said. “Apart from facial recognition, he also has some distinguishing marks and characteristics.”
The Guardian has obtained contemporaneous court notes from an observer who was not party to the case. The notes confirm Pether raised this at his criminal trial and complained that his translated statement was inaccurate and incorrect.
“The Judge asked if there was an issue with the translator. Mr Pether advised that the translator used by the investigation court was an employee of CBI. The Judge then asked if he was biased, Mr Pether said yes.”
Pether has now spent two years behind bars in a Baghdad jail cell, having been arrested in Baghdad in April 2021.
At the time CME was on standby to withdraw employees from Iraq when the central bank sent a 29 March 2021 letter to their Dubai headquarters insisting on a “meeting in Baghdad urgently to discuss and resolve the dispute according to the terms of the contract and not through illegal withdrawal.”
“They were lured into returning to Iraq and are detained under false pretences and on fabricated charges,” the UN working group on arbitrary detention found in a November 2021 report.
“A representative of the Central Bank allegedly stated at one stage that this would ‘all go away’ if CME made large financial concessions and if [Pether and Zaghloul] agreed to stay in Iraq and finish working on the project for free.”
The Iraqi central bank had not paid any CME invoices for seven months, demanding CME accept the loss and continue working for free to compensate for project delays caused by a separate central bank contractor.
The contract was clear that CME was entitled to a contract extension with additional payment, two September 2021 independent reports by engineering contract experts and obtained by the Guardian attest.
The Central Bank of Iraq, the Iraqi prime minister’s office, the Iraqi foreign affairs ministry and embassy to Australia did not respond to detailed questions by the time of publishing.
“I have asked the Australian government to work with their close partners and the Iraq government at the highest levels to help secure my release,” Pether said.
