Elizabeth Byrne

There's all sorts of, it's surrounded by mystery.

But Tom Taylor pursued this for a while.

He wanted to know details like, was this legal?

Were the guidelines followed?

Was this the start of the Mr Big's,

operation.

Now, the police evidence was that this was not the start of it.

This was a separate undercover operation and that the Mr Big part of it didn't start until probably the January of 2023.

And these events were in sort of later 2022.

So we didn't get to see many details about this trip.

But it was an interesting thing that it was never dragged into the evidence.

In fact, the police said in the end that the subpoena was just an exercise in trying to turn something up.

But it does point to the thoroughness of the police investigation, that they were starting it quite early and that they were not letting Mr Fabrizi out of their sights.

It was, and we all sort of sat up and thought, hello, you know, is he throwing Vakoni under a bus?

But when I read back through my notes about the things that were happening in the run-up to the jury being chosen, I realised Sky Jerome had really been

pointed to this quite a few times when she referred to her client as, you know, not denying being there and that sort of thing.

So she had sort of hinted that he was not going to fight that admission.

In Mr Vakoni's case, of course, he made no admissions ever and provided an alibi.

And even though it couldn't be supported, he still maintained he's never been to Canberra.

Well, she'd wanted the trial not to go ahead and she was aiming to find anything that could either temporarily or permanently bring that about.