He was not made aware Gobbo was a supergrass before entering his 2012 guilty plea.
Prosecutors are yet to decide if they will pursue a fresh trial for Orbital, but legal sources said it was unlikely.
Tony Mokbel and his partner (centre) arrive at the Court of Appeal on Thursday.Credit: Joe Armao
The Magnum conviction, which still stands, relates to the trafficking of 16 times the large commercial quantity of methylamphetamine via a large-scale criminal enterprise that Mokbel directed while he was “absconding” the criminal justice system overseas, McLeish said.
During the handing down of its judgment, the Court of Appeal found Gobbo’s involvement had corrupted one of the cases against Mokbel, known as Operation Quills, to a degree that his conviction should be quashed, but found that didn’t automatically extend to the other prosecutions – known as Magnum and Orbital.
The Quills case had alleged Mokbel was part of the large-scale preparation and pressing of ecstasy pills from powder on two pill presses at a Coburg factory, and later a third pill press in a Craigieburn garage that made more than 30 kilograms of MDMA.
The Orbital case – which Mokbel was ordered to face a retrial on – alleges the now 60-year-old commissioned the importation of MDMA powder into Australia in 2005 by placing an order with undercover police for 100 kilograms at a cost of $1.2 million.
In the judgment, the judges said the joint efforts of Gobbo and police to secure critical evidence from a person for whom she was acting, involved a fundamental debasement of her professional obligations.
This, they found, infected the whole Quills prosecution, such that it would have been a profound affront to the administration of justice if it had proceeded to trial.
At sentencing, Mokbel was handed a joint sentence for all three cases after, on April 18, 2011, pleading guilty.
On Thursday, Condon said her client had spent 5005 days in pre-sentence detention from the time of his arrest in Athens on June 5, 2007, until his release on bail in April.
McLeish said that in resentencing Mokbel, the justices had taken into consideration the 2023 quashing of an earlier drug conviction, known as the Plutonium case, an assault on Mokbel in prison and that he would now technically be sentenced as a first-time drug offender.
The courts will also be asked to approve a costs certificate for the case, allowing Mokbel to be reimbursed for his relevant legal costs.
Mokbel remains on bail and is expected to return to court for the Orbital matters later this month.
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