Federal Court leaves intact a corruption finding built on leaked papers, not money

A finding of corruption in Australian public law no longer needs a bribe, a kickback or a dollar of private gain. On 11 December 2025 Justice Wendy Abraham of the Federal Court of Australia dismissed an application for judicial review by Walter Sofronoff KC, a former president of the Queensland Court of Appeal, leaving standing the ACT Integrity Commission's conclusion that he engaged in serious corrupt conduct. Nobody paid him anything. He gave his own inquiry's confidential material, and then its report, to journalists.

The instrument is the Commission's Investigation Report, Operation Juno, transmitted to the Speaker of the ACT Legislative Assembly by Commissioner the Hon Michael F Adams KC on 18 March 2025 and prepared under section 182 of the Integrity Commission Act 2018 (ACT). It runs to 131 pages. It followed a mandatory corruption notification made on 22 September 2023 concerning Mr Sofronoff's conduct as the Board of Inquiry into the ACT Criminal Justice System, the inquiry established after the aborted 2022 criminal trial of Bruce Lehrmann.

The statutory test has two limbs. Under section 9(1)(a) the conduct must be capable of constituting a criminal offence, a serious disciplinary offence, or reasonable grounds for dismissing a public official. Under section 9(1)(b) it must also contravene a listed standard: the exercise of official functions in a way that is not honest or not impartial, a breach of public trust, or the misuse of information acquired in office. Section 10 then supplies the only test of seriousness, which is whether the corrupt conduct is likely to threaten public confidence in the integrity of government or public administration. The report is blunt that seriousness depends "not on the degree to which it is wrongful, but on the negative consequences for public trust".

Mr Sofronoff delivered his report to the ACT Chief Minister on 31 July 2023. A journalist at The Australian received a copy less than an hour later, and an ABC journalist two days after that, before the Chief Minister had made the report public. He had earlier passed confidential inquiry material, including witness statements subject to a non publication order, to the same first journalist. The Commission found the disclosures could constitute an offence under section 17 of the Inquiries Act 1991 (ACT), and that the pattern of communications gave rise to a reasonable apprehension of bias affecting his adverse findings about the then ACT Director of Public Prosecutions.

Motive is where the finding widens the concept. Mr Sofronoff's case was that he acted to ensure timely and accurate reporting of a matter of public concern, that he "obtained no private benefit and acted honestly and in good faith", and that no confidentiality was in the end breached. The Commission rejected the good faith claim, and went further: "It matters not whether the official believes he or she is acting in the public interest." Carelessness, ineptitude or even negligence would not suffice, the report says, but recklessness in the sense of indifference to whether conduct is authorised will.

Before the Federal Court, Mr Sofronoff advanced twelve grounds, including that the Commission had misconstrued corrupt conduct and that its finding was illogical, irrational or unreasonable, and that findings of dishonesty lacked an evidentiary foundation. Justice Abraham held he had "not established that the finding of serious corrupt conduct is either unreasonable, irrational and/or illogical" and concluded that "the applicant has not established jurisdictional error". One concession was made against the Commission, which did not defend its finding that the conduct could constitute contempt under section 36 of the Inquiries Act and agreed to record the error. The court treated it as immaterial. Accounts of the timing differ slightly: The Canberra Times reported the dismissal on 11 December 2025 with reasons published the next day, while The Mandarin on 15 December 2025 gave the citation as [2025] FCA 1565.

The reading is contested. Writing for the Australian Public Law blog on 16 May 2025, Dane Luo argued that the Commission's reliance on parliamentary privilege, on the footing that a tabled report is a proceeding in Parliament, would put integrity findings beyond review and should be construed narrowly. Counsel for Mr Sofronoff told the court his disclosures were an erroneous attempt at accuracy rather than anything corrupt.

The drift elsewhere runs the other way. In Snyder v United States, decided in June 2024, the US Supreme Court read the federal program bribery provision as covering bribes but not after the fact gratuities, and Morrison Foerster's survey published on 6 July 2026 records the Seventh Circuit vacating conspiracy convictions in United States v Pramaggiore and McClain on 15 June 2026 because the jury may have relied on a theory Snyder had invalidated.

What is not known is where the Australian line now sits. If corruption can be made out with no gain, no payment and no proven venal motive, the distance between maladministration and corruption narrows to a judgement about public confidence that section 10 says need not even be probable. Whether any prosecution follows Operation Juno, and whether a further appeal has been lodged, is not apparent from the material published so far.