Narugga MP Fraser Ellis says he was prepared to accept his guilty verdicts, until the Director of Public Prosecutions launched an appeal against all charges he was acquitted of earlier this month.

On July 1, Mr Ellis was found guilty on four charges of deception in regard to misusing the state Country Members Accommodation Allowance (CMAA), which he has now appealed after the DPP’s decision to appeal against another 19 charges he had been acquitted of.

Mr Ellis said the DPP’s decision left him with no practical alternative but to move forward with his own appeal against the guilty verdicts.

“Even though I do not agree with the guilty verdicts, for pragmatic reasons I was prepared to accept the findings of the Magistrate and put the matter behind me,” Mr Ellis said in a statement released last week.

“This entire process has taken an enormous toll on my family and I.

“I feel as though I have been singled out of a group of Members of Parliament who made similar errors.”

The DPP lodged documents with the Supreme Court stating Magistrate Simon Smart had erred on four grounds when the ruling was handed down.

The documents asked for the acquittals to be set aside and substituted for convictions, or for the matter to be retried.

It said the magistrate erred in ruling that each date needed to be proved beyond reasonable doubt, and that he failed to consider the crossadmissible evidence between the guilty and not guilty counts.

Mr Ellis was found guilty on the four counts in the Adelaide Magistrates Court on Monday, July 1.

He had faced a total of 23 charges of deception in relation to improperly claiming the CMAA from April 2018 to June 2020.

Magistrate Smart found Mr Ellis guilty of falsely claiming about $2800.

Magistrate Smart said many of the alleged frauds were innocent, explainable errors of memory or accounting, but four were “dishonest” and “deliberate falsehoods”. The 23 counts related to 78 claims totalling $18,000.

The CMAA is available to MPs whose usual place of residence is more than 75 kilometres from Adelaide, and who are required to stay in Adelaide overnight to attend parliamentary or other relevant duties.

It was alleged Mr Ellis claimed the allowance for nights he did not spend in Adelaide, and he was unaware of a rule change in November 2018, whereby politicians had to incur actual expenditure to receive the payment.

Mr Ellis voluntarily repaid more than $42,000 in claims, stating some may have been made in error, before the investigation by the Independent Commissioner Against Corruption was announced in 2020.

The appeals will go before the Supreme Court at a later date.

This article appeared in  Yorke Peninsula Country Times, 30 July 2024.
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