Clive Palmer’s bid to sue Australia for $300 billion hits court on Monday

Clive Palmer’s astronomical bid to sue Australia for $300 billion hits court on Monday, with allegations of government espionage, standover tactics and the leak of top-secret information set to be aired. Extraordinarily, the colourful mining magnate is taking his latest court fight all the way to the Hague in the Netherlands in a battle that could conceivably cost every person in Australia $11,500. He is no stranger to legal action and launched his bid for big money after Mark McGowan’s government passed an unprecedented law to kill off Mr Palmer’s multi-billion-dollar claim against Western Australia. As part of the latest case, the Queensland billionaire is alleging the Federal Government could be hacking his lawyers’ computers and also intends to call his former lawyer Christian Porter — the ex-Federal Attorney-General — as a witness. The huge damages claim is being made via the ASEAN-Australia New Zealand Free Trade Agreement, through a little-known investor-state dispute settlement clause. Those clauses allow for foreign investors, including Australian investors overseas, the right to access an international tribunal to resolve investment disputes. In 2019, Mr Palmer registered Zeph Investments — which owns the 70-year-old’s Mineralogy company — in Singapore. And it is that company name which appears on Mr Palmer’s claim to the Permanent Court of Arbitration, based in the Netherlands. At its heart, Mr Palmer’s claim seeks US $198,202,414,285 in damages, interest and costs, due to alleged loss of a contractual entitlement, and “sovereign risk” to other projects — including $10b in “moral damages”. He says those losses stem from WA’s unprecedented 2020 Amendment Act, developed and drawn up in secret between Mr McGowan, Attorney-General John Quigley and the State’s top lawyers. The Act torpedoed a bid by Mr Palmer to take $30b in damages from the State, after it refused to approve Mineralogy’s proposal to develop the Balmoral South iron ore mine in the Pilbara. Appeals all the way to the High Court by Mr Palmer failed. So, beginning on Monday, his arbitration bid will go before a panel of three — with the Federal Government’s top-flight legal team set to put forward their objections. In preliminary legal skirmishes, Mr Palmer has claimed that in July last year, a group of his lawyers — including his wife Anna — simultaneously received a request for a “single-use code” from Microsoft, despite not having asked for one. The code is issued to be used to access a Windows account without a password. “The claimant submits ‘that the communications of its representative and those assisting its representative may be (being) monitored by Australian intelligence agencies,” the Permanent Court of Arbitration document reveals. Professor Gabrielle Kaufmann-Kohler, the president of the tribunal who will sit on the claim, said she found it “remarkably coincidental and perhaps disconcerting” that four of Mr Palmer’s lawyers had received such notifications around the same time. However, she said there was no evidence it was the Australian Government trying to hack into their computers. In another legal broadside, Mr Palmer sought an order that the Government refrain from the “intimidation” of his witnesses, citing Mr Porter. After it emerged he may be representing Mr Palmer in court, Federal authorities contacted the former attorney-general with concerns about him potentially disclosing confidential information. But the tribunal found Mr Porter had not felt intimidated, had in fact given a witness statement and promised to “engage” with the tribunal. A bid by the Queensland magnate to have his pending criminal charges in his home State paused while the arbitration continued was also batted away by the tribunal. However, during arguments over which country the arbitration should sit in, the tribunal gave some weight to Mr Palmer’s argument that London should not be considered, due to the close constitutional and political ties of Australia and the UK. It said it appreciated his concerns about basing it in London due to a perception “of lack of neutrality and risk of bias”. When the $300b claim first emerged last year, it alleged Mr McGowan, Mr Quigley and their advisers came up with a plan “to effectively destroy (Mr Palmer’s) iron ore mining investments in Western Australia”. “The legislation, prepared in secret and passed under urgency, was less like a ‘Trojan horse’ and more like a ‘juggernaut destroying everything in its path’,” the document stated. Mr McGowan used parliamentary privilege to then label Mr Palmer “the greediest man in Australian history”. “Imagine already having billions of dollars and making $1 million to $2m a day from a Chinese company in Western Australia without lifting a finger, but being so rapacious that you turn around and sue your own country for $300b,” Mr McGowan said. “It is greed. It is treachery. He is a quisling … “Mr Palmer has now cemented himself in Australian history as the most appalling and selfish person our country has ever seen.”