‘Fall from grace’ bureaucrat spared jail over fraud
A SENIOR bureaucrat who defrauded the Victorian government out of almost $1m has been given a two-year community corrections order.
Darrell Fraser, 67, will not go to jail but sentencing County Court Judge Martine Marich said he had experienced a “fall from grace”.
The father of two and grandfather of three will also have to complete 300 hours of unpaid community work.
Fraser was a deputy secretary of the Department of Education when he arranged for a middleman company to channel $999,996 of taxpayers’ money from the department to IT company CSG.
The fraud took place in 2011 and Fraser’s contract was terminated later that year. He went on to get a job as chief education officer with CSG.
The political scandal revolved around Ultranet, which was supposed to be an online internet-based learning system available to all government schools in Victoria, overseen by Mr Fraser and delivered by CSG.
It spectacularly crashed in front of 5000 school principals and other important guests during its launch in August 2010.
Mr Fraser wanted several people at CSG to stay employed on the project, so he created an “apparently legitimate” reason for a consultant, Alliance Recruitment, to be hired by the state government.
The department handed over close to $1 million to Alliance Recruitment without the company doing anything besides secretly passing the money on to CSG and pocketing about $56,000 for itself.
Judge Marich said that after the “disaster” launch of Mr Fraser’s pet project, Ultranet, he “came up with the plan” to use a “sophisticated process” to keep paying his associates at CSG through the Department of Education’s financial system, in a “patent misuse” of his position in public office.