Uncertainty remains over property developer Jean Nassif's ICAC appearance

Like many other inflated claims by Nassif, including his fake university degrees, this one about excelling in Sydney turned out to be very, very wrong.

On February 28, 2023, NSW police raided Nassif’s Concord office and his waterfront Chiswick home, where they found $200,000 in cash in Nissy’s handbags and inside a wardrobe. She later abandoned her attempts to have the seized funds returned.

Also raided that day was the city office of EA Legal, the law firm run by Evelyn and Ashlyn, Nassif’s two daughters from his first marriage. Ashlyn was arrested later that same day over her role in falsifying pre-sale contracts to help her father secure the $150 million loan.

In intercepted phone calls, Nassif was heard admitting the contracts are “fake” and “never going to be completed”.

By the time police issued a warrant for Nassif’s arrest in June 2023, he’d already fled to Lebanon. He left Sydney on December 9, 2022, the day after NSW Parliament announced an inquiry into his funding of Liberal Party operatives, in breach of electoral funding laws, to achieve political outcomes that he thought could smooth the way for his troubled developments, which had been hit with stop work orders by Chandler.

Days after Nassif left the county, NSW Fair Trading stripped his building licence for 10 years and Toplace’s licence was permanently revoked for failing to rectify a litany of defects.

Ashlyn was just one month old when Jean and his older brothers Sarkis and Bakhos (Joseph) started their company Oz Leb Development, which later changed its name to Holdmark Developers in 1998.

The brothers appeared to go their separate ways around 2008. Nassif set up his own construction company Toplace in 2009. He had already fled to Lebanon when Toplace collapsed in July 2023 with debts of about $1.6 billion.

However, Nassif appeared to have been siphoning money offshore before Toplace collapsed. In January 2019, one of Nassif’s companies took $10 million from the Westpac loan facility and deposited it into a Lebanese bank account belonging to Nassif’s brother Bakhos.

In 2018, another $7 million of company funds were used to purchase land in Lebanon, while $1.3 million was spent on a “warehouse project” in Nigeria.

One set of administrators reported that their investigations “have uncovered a myriad of interrelated company loans, creditors, and payments from Bankstown to Beirut”.

“There is more to this than meets the eye, which I am not prepared to go into,” Nassif’s lawyer Rebekah Giles said in 2019, when her client Nassif pleaded guilty to cocaine charges after the high-roller was caught with the prohibited drug on his way into Sydney’s The Star casino.

Nassif was given an 18-month conditional release order and no conviction was recorded on account of his good character.

Giles might have been referring to her client’s belief that it was the police minister who had orchestrated his arrest.

Giving evidence last month, Elliott told counsel assisting the commission that he was aware that Nassif had blamed him for his arrest at the casino. “Now, I can assure you, Dr Dwyer, if I’d asked the NSW Police Force to issue a parking ticket, they would punch me in the neck.”

A fellow high-roller at The Star casino has told the Herald that Nassif was regularly “drinking, doing coke and smoking cigars” as he played the slot machines within the Sovereign Room, a private VIP room for high-rollers.

He said Nassif would come into the casino carrying a Louis Vuitton duffle bag containing cash. Nassif allegedly gambled for several hours, several days per week, regularly gambling up to $250,000 per day, the high-roller observed.

The Herald has previously revealed that in April 2021, Nassif allegedly supplied couriers with 10 kilograms of the drug ice to be delivered to Perth. The couriers were arrested at the handover.

During the 2024 trial of courier Mathew Peagram, the West Australian District Court heard that in a pre-dawn meeting at Nassif’s development site in Castle Hill, Nassif handed over a Nike sports bag of methamphetamine with an estimated street value of $10 million.

He also provided the couriers with encrypted Ciphr phones and thousands of dollars in cash as “spending money” for the journey. Peagram, who was told the bag contained foreign currency, was assigned the codename “Picasso”.

“Nassif was in charge and did all the talking. I didn’t ask any questions about the bag, as I assumed he was doing something illegal with the currency,” Peagram alleged.

In 2024, the two couriers were each sentenced to a maximum of 11 years and six months’ jail.

Judge Mara Barone said that although they were instructed “to deliver foreign currency from Mr Nassif” the pair later became aware it was the drug ice, yet they chose to continue.

Nassif has denied any involvement in the drug supply matter.

“I am a man of honour, a fighter, one of God’s warriors. I am the voice that screams very high against evil forces,” Nassif told reporters in 2023 after his arrest warrant was issued over the fraudulently obtained Westpac loan. “I will be back to defend myself and the truth will always prevail.”

Whether Nassif and his money train of truisms will ever pull into the ICAC station remains to be seen.

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