Company director and corporate lawyer Adam Schwab writes:


Leonie
Wood and Rebecca Urban produced this great
piece in The Age
on the circus that has become the Ted Sent/Sandi Porter Supreme Court
unfair dismissal action against retirement village developer,
Primelife.

The
cast of identities in the trial is the business equivalent of the cast of a Hollywood
blockbuster. Primelife is led by the millionaire former lord mayor of Melbourne, Ron
Walker, and former boss of Normandy Mining, Robert
de Crespigny, both Rich
200 members.

Meanwhile, the plaintiff is former Primelife CEO Ted Sent, a former
bankrupt who was once charged with tax evasion. Sent is certainly one of
Melbourne’s
more colourful business figures. In fact there is an old joke in
Melbourne’s
business community that if the police ever found Ted Sent shot dead, they
wouldn’t know where to start looking as half of
Melbourne
could be a suspect. According to The Age, de
Crespigny was once told by a federal senator that Sent was “the biggest crook in
Australia.”

Also
suing Primelife is Sandi Porter, Sent’s loyal assistant for more than 20 years.
As noted by The Age,
Porter spent more than two years tapping the phone lines of Primelife staff and
even secretly taped board discussions, despite being asked by Primelife director
Robert de Crespigny not to do so. De Crespigny allegedly described Porter as “a
curse, an unmitigated disaster.” Presumably, de Crespigny’s opinion of Ms Porter
did not improve after he discovered that she had been illicitly taping
him.

The
strange aspect of the defence is that Primelife did not (by all public reports
anyway) point out that Porter’s secret taping activities seem
to be a fairly clear-cut breach of the law.

In
1999, the Victorian government introduced the Surveillance Devices
Act. The purposes of the Act included among other things, the
regulation of surveillance devices. The Act is quite explicit, stating, at
section four that:

“a
person must not knowingly install, use or maintain a listening device to
overhead, record, monitor or listen to a private conversation to which the
person is not a party, without the express or implied consent of each party to
the conversation.”

Section seven of the Act contains a similar provision relating to “optical surveillance
devices” such as video cameras (or even mobile phone cameras).

A
breach of sections four or seven of the Act can result in two years jail or a $24,000
fine – per offence. There are scant defences to a breach, with exceptions made
for law enforcement officials or where consent has been
provided.

There are two strange aspects here. First, why hasn’t Porter been
charged under the Surveillance Act (she doesn’t seem to be denying
using the surveillance devices)? Second, while commission of a crime is
not necessarily an absolute defence against an unfair dismissal claim,
it certainly wouldn’t hurt Primelife’s case if the plaintiff bringing
the action was terminated due to commission of a crime (in fairness to
Primelife, this issue may have been brought up by counsel but not
reported).

Meanwhile,
arguments in the case have concluded, with Justice Philip Mandie considering his
verdict.