October 5, 2026 — 11:48am Save You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from your saved list to add more. AAA For almost 10 weeks, the state’s corruption watchdog painstakingly extracted evidence from backroom political operatives – and even fugitive developer Jean Nassif from his Beirut bedroom – but there was
For almost 10 weeks, the state’s corruption watchdog painstakingly extracted evidence from backroom political operatives – and even fugitive developer Jean Nassif from his Beirut bedroom – but there was one central figure who remained the ghost of Operation Rosny.
One-time Liberal powerbroker Christian Ellis, who skilfully evaded a parliamentary inquiry by hiding in the forests south of Sydney in 2023, again managed to dodge efforts to bring him to give public evidence about his role in an alleged illegal donations scheme to the Independent Commission Against Corruption.
Final exhibits tendered to the inquiry, which wrapped last week, reveal the ways the ICAC bent over backwards to secure the evidence of Ellis, who moved to the UK earlier this year and has no plans to return to Australia.
The ICAC wrote to Ellis and his lawyer several times, offering to sit into the evening to allow for the time difference, offered a break every two hours and proposed that he dial in from his home so as not to disrupt family commitments, the documents reveal.
Still, that wasn’t enough to convince Ellis. The ICAC is now assessing the evidence given by his former political allies and clients before it decides if any of Ellis’s conduct amounts to corruption.
The founding member of the Reformers right-wing sub-faction of the Liberal party wasn’t staying completely in the dark. As the ICAC heard, his mate and former business partner Jeremy Greenwood was in regular contact, and had even flown to meet Ellis in London in June, just weeks before the public inquiry was announced.
Ellis wanted to cooperate with the public inquiry, he told Greenwood over the phone, but didn’t know how. Greenwood relayed this to the ICAC during his own questioning.
“If Mr Ellis is listening, the commission waits for his response,” assistant commissioner Fabian Gleeson, SC, said.
In a letter to Ellis the next day, an ICAC investigator reiterated the arrangements they could make to facilitate his evidence.
Documents also revealed that Ellis’ lawyer, Simon Diab, had offered participation in the public inquiry only by responding to written questions. The ICAC refused.
The documents also showed that the ICAC refused Diab’s application to represent Ellis at the public inquiry, although the reasons given for this refusal were redacted. Ellis gave evidence in a private hearing in 2024, although only a short excerpt was tendered to the public inquiry, and has remained silent since the public hearings began.
Ellis is no stranger to life on the run.
When Liberal MP Ray Williams stood up in parliament and made extraordinary claims about alleged corruption in his own party in 2022, Ellis was hard at work for his right wing factional group the Reformers. He was waging factional warfare in Deniliquin in the federal seat of Farrer, not to unseat a rival political party, but to oust moderate Liberal Sussan Ley and instead seize the branch for the right faction.
And he was having some success.
“Word from the south,” fellow Reformer and once Catholic Schools NSW staffer Robert Assaf texted some factional friends.
“Tobias Lehmann has just lost the presidency of Farrer FEC. Big result for the team down there. All thanks to Christian for his work on this.”
Meanwhile, the Reformers were holding events with conservative titans such as Alan Jones, and working to recruit new religious conservatives to the Liberal Party, especially in the Hills Shire.
At the same time, Ellis and Greenwood were being paid large cheques from Jean Nassif’s Toplace, allegedly in partnership with Charles Perrottet in exchange for political outcomes. In 2021, Ellis attended a Liberal fundraiser, headlined by then-treasurer Dominic Perrottet and Robyn Preston, with a friend in tow – Toplace’s lawyer and one-time Labor Strathfield councillor Sharangan Maheswaran, another star witness in the ICAC inquiry.
Money was also coming in from Catholic Schools NSW, via an allegedly sham contract approved by the CEO, fellow right-wing Liberal Dallas McInerney, to Ellis’s government relations firm Beckington, allegedly a way to help fund the work of the Reformers. McInerney has denied wrongdoing.
Despite his powerful political connections and months of scheming to stack branches in Farrer, Ellis would fail in his mission to dump Ley, losing a vote during a November 2022 branch meeting after Ley made a secret 11-hour drive from Canberra to the regional NSW town of Finley for the vote.
Ley walked up to Ellis, looked him in the eyes and said: “You f—ed with the wrong person, you gutless prick.”
Another thorn in Ellis’s side came a month later when the NSW Parliament launched an inquiry into the allegations raised in Williams’s speech, which specifically named Ellis. He was called as a witness, along with Greenwood, and Perrottet brothers Jean-Claude and Charles.
Ellis went into hiding, managing to dodge process servers hired by the parliament to track him down. His wife at one point answered the door to their rural Deniliquin home and told the agent she didn’t know her husband’s movements.
“The agent noted the female person to appear nervous and evasive,” a report given to the inquiry said.
Rumours were flying around Deniliquin. Long-time Liberal branch member Shirlee Burge told the parliamentary inquiry she believed Ellis was living on a property backing onto dense forest where “people could disappear in there forever”. There had been sightings of vehicles going into the forest, she said.
Burge said she believes she saw Ellis driving around wearing a black, full-face ski mask.
Ellis managed to evade a statewide manhunt despite the best efforts of the parliamentary inquiry, and after the Liberal Party lost the 2023 state election, Ellis and the Reformers went quiet. In August 2023 Ellis was expelled from the party for bringing it into disrepute.
While Operation Rosny never heard from Ellis in the public hearings, his connections to powerful people became clear through evidence before the ICAC. McInerney, for example, spoke at a Reformers event and agreed to sign-on Catholic Schools NSW as Beckington’s first client.
He was supportive of Ellis not just professionally and politically, but also personally.
Documents tendered to the ICAC show McInerney wrote a character reference for Ellis in 2019 after a drink-driving offence, praising Ellis as respectful and professional.
“Without equivocation, I provide this reference in support of a fine young citizen held in high regard by many for his outstanding character,” McInerney wrote. It’s unclear if the reference was ever used in court.
With Ellis refusing to cooperate with the ICAC’s public hearings, the commission will have to determine if Ellis and his friends solicited unlawful political donations, and if they engaged in corruption, without his public testimony.
While Ellis’ career in Australian politics is over, he remains in the UK where the ICAC’s jurisdiction doesn’t reach.
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Jessica McSweeney is a reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald covering state politics and urban affairs.Connect via email.From our partners
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