Disclosure: Bakchos was the accused in the ACT Supreme Court proceedings in 2017 in which these documents were tendered, and was acquitted on all 16 counts.
by Bill Wheatley
Scope of this report
This paper reports on a small group of documents from the ACT Department of Treasury that were put before the ACT Supreme Court in proceedings in March 2017, and that have been publicly available online since 2017. The first is a letter dated 9 May 2002 from Angel Marina, then Manager of the Rates and Land Tax Section of the Revenue Management Branch, to Howard Ronaldson, then Chief Executive of Treasury. The second is an email sent by Mark Mullins to Deputy Chief Executive Tu Pham on the afternoon of the same day. The third is a letter of 27 June 2003 from Mullins, by then Commissioner for ACT Revenue and Acting Director of the Branch, to Chief Minister and Attorney-General Jon Stanhope. The fourth is the reply of 4 July 2003 from Mike Harris, Chief Executive of Treasury. The fifth is a letter of 26 June 2005 from Chris Roberts, Director of Investigations at the ACT Ombudsman.
The 27 June 2003 letter is long and covers several subjects. This paper reports only the parts that concern Marina and the Department’s response to them. It does not purport to summarise the rest of the letter, and nothing should be inferred from what is omitted. Throughout, the paper separates what the documents themselves establish, such as that they exist, who wrote them, when, and what they say, from allegations made within them, which are attributed and not adopted. The verdict in the proceedings in which these documents were tendered concerned the charges before the jury. It was not a finding that any allegation in these documents is true.
The letter of 9 May 2002
The letter is headed “Allegations against Mr Mark Mullins” and is stamped “Confidential” at the top and bottom. It is signed by Marina and addressed to Ronaldson. There are handwritten notations at the top right, only partly legible on the copy reviewed. A caption added to the copy supplied for this paper states that it was presented in the ACT Supreme Court in March 2017 and that Ronaldson told the court he saw the letter and remembered the racist remarks.
Marina begins by asking the Chief Executive to conduct a formal investigation into what he calls the unethical behaviour of Mullins. He writes that he has “investigated” Mullins’s background and “established” that Mullins is a compulsive liar, unethical and unsuitable to be a senior manager in the ACT Public Service. The letter makes further allegations about Mullins’s qualifications and outside work, none of which is tested in the documents and none of which this paper examines.
The passage that matters for this report comes next. Marina says that contacts of his within the Australian Federal Police had told him that members of Mullins’s family had criminal records. He then draws a general conclusion from that: “This confirms my experience that Aborigines are compulsive liars and criminals and unsuitable to hold management positions. Mr Mullins is no exception.” Whether the premise is true is not something the documents address, and this paper does not repeat or adopt it. What the documents establish is the conclusion Marina drew from it. Near the end he writes: “I request that Mr Mullins be dismissed from the ACT Public Service due to his unethical behaviour and the general disposition of Aborigines to lie and the criminal records of his family.”
These are Marina’s words, in his own signed letter, addressed to the head of the Department. Nobody has to rely on Mullins’s account of what was said, because the letter says it. That makes it the most reliable item in the set, and it is why the quotations above are given in full and attributed to the letter itself. A mid-level manager asking the Chief Executive to dismiss his line manager, the Commissioner for Revenue, partly on the stated ground of a “general disposition” of Aboriginal people to lie is, on the face of the document, a request founded on race.
The email of the same afternoon
Mullins’s email to Pham is dated Thursday 9 May 2002 at 15:33. Its subject line is “Racist Attack By Mr Angel Marina on Me”, and it is marked confidential. Mullins writes that he received from a colleague that morning a letter written by Marina to the Chief Executive requesting that he be “dismissed from the ACT Public Service due to [my] unethical behaviour and the general disposition of Aborigines to lie and the criminal records of [my family].” The quoted words match Marina’s letter. Mullins adds that Marina attached copies of his job applications and asks how Marina was able to obtain them. He recalls his reluctance to accept a position in Treasury given his earlier experience with Marina at another agency, and says his 2001 application had contained conditions concerning Marina and an indemnity that Pham had executed for the Department. He says Marina’s actions in writing the letter might have triggered that indemnity, which he describes as an issue for another time.
The email shows that Mullins complained in writing to a senior officer on the day he received the letter. Its closing paragraph is different in kind and is Mullins’s own view, not a finding. Given what he calls Marina’s “most emphatic denial” of involvement in any missing monies, he writes that he believes it is time the Department took a long hard look at Mr Wylucki’s concerns about possible fraudulent activity in Marina’s area. In his letter of 27 June 2003, Mullins says the copy of this email he annexed bears Pham’s original signature. This shows that the email was received and acknowledged. It would not by itself show what was done about it.
The reference to missing money
The last line of Marina’s letter is a denial of a different kind. He writes that he denies “the Alan Wylucki allegations that I have defrauded the land tax system, or have any involvement in the theft of $130 Million that Mr Mullins has identified as missing from Treasury.”
The two documents together support a narrow conclusion. On 9 May 2002, Marina himself told the Chief Executive in writing that allegations existed of fraud in the land tax system and of a missing sum of $130 million, that they were associated with Wylucki and Mullins, and that he denied any involvement. Mullins’s email, sent hours later, refers to the same concerns and asks the Department to examine them. The senior officers who received these documents were therefore on written notice from 9 May 2002 that such allegations were being made.
That conclusion needs to be kept in its place. The $130 million is Marina’s description of what Mullins had identified, in the course of denying it. The letter does not say the money was missing, that it was stolen, or that Marina took it. Nothing in these two documents says what the allegations rested on or what became of them. Mullins’s 2003 letter describes Marina as having been under investigation for fraud since 16 October 2002. In fairness, the terms of reference discussed below do not use those words.
In two separate documents from 2003 Marina provides an extremely detailed description of everything he did to undermine the audit. An interim report was provided by the auditors in April 2003. It was never finalised because Marina refused to provide his comments. The audit was changed after Pham removed Mullins from the commissioner’s role, so the matter referenced in the ToR has never been finalised.
The terms of reference for the special audit
A further document is a single page headed “Terms of Reference” (ToR) for an “Enquiry into the Management and Administration of the Rates and Land Tax Section of the ACT Revenue Office”. It is signed by Tu Pham as Deputy Chief Executive of the Department of Treasury. Mullins’s 2003 letter gives the date of signing as 16 October 2002.
The first term provides for a special audit of the section by an independent firm from the ACT Government audit panel, to investigate “matters of concern raised by Mr Alan Wylucki relating to possible discrepancies in rates and tax assessments for similarly valued commercial properties.” The third term requires an analysis of all commercial rates and land tax billings for the previous five years, to be made by the Commissioner for ACT Revenue, who at the time was Mullins. The fourth requires that any discrepancies found be investigated “to determine if they result from defective administration or deliberate fraud.” The seventh requires the Commissioner to report to the Deputy Chief Executive by 30 June 2003, with recommendations including, where appropriate, on referring specific and identified concerns to the Director of Public Prosecutions.
What this establishes is that the Department formally recorded Wylucki’s concerns, treated them as serious enough to warrant an independent audit, and contemplated that fraud might be one explanation and a referral to the Director of Public Prosecutions one outcome. That supports the point that the allegations Marina denied on 9 May 2002 led to a formal process within months. It is also consistent with Mullins’s account of his September 2002 meeting with Marina about inconsistencies in assessment notices.
Mullins’s account in 2003
In his letter of 27 June 2003, Mullins sets out the Marina matters under the heading “Racism within the ACT Public Service” and again under headings dealing with the grievance process and with threats and intimidation. He quotes the 9 May 2002 letter and says a true copy is annexed to his letter as annexure A. He says Marina assaulted and racially abused him on more than one occasion at work. He dates the first assault to 9 September 2002, during a meeting at which he was formally notifying Marina of an allegation concerning inconsistencies in rates and land tax assessment notices. He says Marina took hold of his jacket and shook him, used a racial slur, and told him to stop his enquiries. He names a colleague, Gretel Heesch, as a witness to that incident. He describes a second incident in April 2003, witnessed by a colleague, Glen Gaskill, who wrote a letter about it dated 4 May 2003, annexed to Mullins’s letter. He says both incidents were reported to Pham and that no action was taken against Marina.
He also alleges that grievances were lodged against him by Marina and others immediately after he received an initial draft of the special audit report, and says that Marina, being under investigation, was not eligible to lodge a grievance.
The letter also asks that it be treated as a Public Interest Disclosure concerning a separate matter involving a tender process, which this paper does not report.
The Chief Executive’s reply
Harris’s reply, dated 4 July 2003, is addressed to Mullins and says the letter to the Chief Minister had been referred to him for appropriate action. On the Marina matters his response is direct. He writes that Mullins’ allegations that Marina “has assaulted you and racially vilified you” have been investigated, that he is satisfied “these events did take place”, and that he has referred the matters to the Director Corporate Services for appropriate action.
This is the Department’s own finding, made by its chief executive within about a week of the letter. It needs to be described precisely. It concerns the assault and racial vilification events. It does not mention the 9 May 2002 letter by name, though that letter is the central document in Mullins’ account of the vilification. It says nothing about the fraud investigation or the missing money, and it does not say what action followed the referral. Harris also wrote that many of the matters Mullins raised would require the Chief Minister to pre-empt or override investigations before they were complete, which he did not support. He said the Department should first receive the written reports of the investigating officers. He added that Mullins’ own investigation into the Rates and Land Tax area was understood to be nearing completion, and that once it was complete, consideration would be given to the appropriate course of action.
Read together, the reply shows an institution that accepted in writing in July 2003 that an officer had assaulted and racially vilified a senior colleague. It also shows that the question of what happened to that officer was passed to another part of the Department.
The Ombudsman’s letter of 2005
The Ombudsman’s letter of 26 June 2005, under reference 2005-2419256, deals with a complaint by Mullins that Treasury had not acted on a Public Interest Disclosure he said he lodged with the Acting Chief Executive in December 2003. It records that the Department advised it had no record of receiving such a disclosure, and that the previous Director of Corporate Services also had no recollection of one. It states that the Department had described Mullins’s reference to a disclosure in his letter of 27 June 2003 as an “oblique reference”, and that the Chief Executive’s letter of 4 July 2003 had indicated he did not intend to investigate under the Public Interest Disclosure Act but had referred Mullins to the Ombudsman. The Director of Investigations wrote that he had not seen compelling evidence that a disclosure was lodged in December 2003 and proposed to close the complaint. He recorded that Mullins had lodged a new disclosure with the Ombudsman on 13 May 2005.
The letter does not say that Treasury still held the 2003 correspondence. It shows that in 2005 the Department was able to describe both the 27 June 2003 letter and the 4 July 2003 reply to the Ombudsman, from which a reader may infer that they were on its files. That inference is reasonable but is not a statement in the letter. The Department’s description of the June 2003 letter as an “oblique reference” to a disclosure also sits uneasily with a letter that, on its face, asks to be treated as one. This might simply reflect a difference in legal characterisation.
What the documents establish
The documents establish the following. On 9 May 2002 a Treasury manager wrote to the Chief Executive asking that a colleague be dismissed, partly on the stated ground of a “general disposition” of Aboriginal people to lie. The same letter denied allegations of land tax fraud and of involvement in a missing $130 million, which it attributed to a colleague and to Mullins. The recipient of the request was on written notice of those allegations, and, according to the caption on the supplied copy, told the Supreme Court in 2017 that he saw the letter and remembered the remarks. Mullins complained in writing to a senior officer the same day and asked the Department to examine the fraud concerns. Terms of reference signed by Pham, which on Mullins’s account date from October 2002, show the Department commissioning an independent audit of the section in response to Wylucki’s concerns. Fourteen months later, the Chief Executive wrote that he was satisfied the assault and racial vilification had occurred and had referred the matters on for action. By 2005 the Department was telling the Ombudsman that it held no record of a later disclosure.
The documents do not establish that any money was missing, that Marina defrauded the land tax system, or what the special audit found. They do not show what action followed the 2003 referral. They do not show that any person other than Marina shared the views expressed in his letter. The questions they raise are institutional ones: what the Department did with a written request to dismiss a senior officer on racial grounds, what became of the fraud allegations it was told of in the same letter, and why, by 2005, the paper trail was being described as oblique.
Note on omissions and publication
This report omits several matters in the documents: the allegations in the 27 June 2003 letter about a tender process and a loan portfolio, an alleged exchange with the Government Solicitor, Marina’s assertion about the criminal records of Mullins’ relatives, and passages naming private individuals. The omissions are deliberate. They rest on allegations or recollections that the documents do not corroborate.
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© Blak and Black, October 2026
This is racism, unadulterated racism, it has to be addressed.