DISGRACED former NSW government minister Milton Orkopoulos has broken his silence, telling the woman who helped put him in jail that he was penniless, single, and owed thousands of dollars to ‘‘the Legislature of NSW’’.
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Swansea whistleblower Gillian Sneddon was ‘‘welcome to the clothes off my back’’, Orkopoulos wrote from Lithgow Jail in a letter to her solicitor in early August.
But that was all he could pay towards the $438,000 he owes her after a NSW Supreme Court workers’ compensation case.
‘‘As a single male who has no savings, house, car, nor any other property of value, save that of my used clothes and books ... I cannot imagine, having lost everything, how I might be in a position to ever satisfy the judgment,’’ Orkopoulos wrote.
Orkopoulos and his estranged wife Kathy are in the process of divorcing.
The former Swansea MP was jailed for at least nine years and three months in May 2008 after his conviction on 30 charges including possessing child pornography, heroin supply and sexual intercourse without consent.
The minimum sentence was reduced to nine years after an appeal in 2009, making him eligible for release in January 2017.
Ms Sneddon’s lawyers wrote to Orkopoulos in June after she won a workers’ compensation case against him and her nominal employer, the former Speaker of the NSW Lower House Richard Torbay.
A judge accepted Orkopoulos bullied and harassed Ms Sneddon in 2005 and 2006. The mistreatment occurred after the former Swansea electorate secretary told Orkopoulos that a teenage male had made sexual abuse allegations to her about him.
In his letter from jail Orkopoulos said he had received a copy of the judgment from the registrar of the NSW Supreme Court.
The court had earlier issued a default judgment against him after it was advised he had no money to defend Ms Sneddon’s action.
Orkopoulos wrote he would be unable to pay Ms Sneddon the $438,000 in damages awarded by the court because he had no assets apart from his clothes and books, and owed money because of his ‘‘sudden resignation’’ in November 2006 when he was arrested and charged.
‘‘I owe the Legislature of NSW and my credit union thousands of dollars in overdraft payments caused by the interruption of my sudden resignation and subsequent cancellation of my superannuation entitlements three days after my arrest and two years before my trial,’’ he wrote.
‘‘She [Ms Sneddon] is therefore welcome to the clothes off my back.’’
He was unlikely to be able to pay the money after his release from jail in 2017, when he is ‘‘scheduled to be released from my obligations to Her Majesty when I am over 60 years of age’’.
In a letter in reply Ms Sneddon told Orkopoulos ‘‘you have stuffed up my life, as you have your victims. I hope you do not get any pleasure in that.’’
