Former U.S. Marine pilot and Australian citizen, Daniel Duggan, will be unable to sell his Australian home after the NSW Supreme Court decided to uphold a U.S. restraining order on his property.
Mr. Duggan, 55, is currently being held in a maximum security jail in Lithgow Correctional Centre in Sydney and faces extradition to the United States over allegations he unlawfully trained Chinese military pilots.
If extradited, Mr. Duggan faces conspiracy charges over allegations he unlawfully exported defence services to China, conspired to defraud the U.S. government, and money laundering. He also faces up to 60 years in prison.
According to a 2017 indictment unsealed by a U.S. District Court in Washington in December 2022, Mr. Duggan provided military training to Chinese pilots through a South African flight school on three occasions in 2010 and 2012, while he was a U.S. citizen.
It is alleged that in 2011 or 2012, Mr. Duggan received either $116,000 or $166,000 for this role.
In November, Mr. Duggan filed a challenge in the NSW Supreme Court to lift a U.S.-approved Australian Federal Police (AFP) restraining order on his home in Saddleback Mountain.
Lawyers for Mr. Duggan argued that the order should be discharged due to “two serious misrepresentations” on the AFP’s application.
The first was that the property owner, Power Art Trading Ltd, was incorrectly named in the AFP affidavit as “Power Art Trading Pty Ltd.”
The second was that Mr. Duggan was incorrectly named as the director of Power Art Trading Ltd. Instead, his wife, Saffrine Duggan, is the sole director of the company, with lawyers arguing that the property is the “sole asset” of his wife and children.
On Dec. 6, NSW Supreme Court Justice Nicholas Chen dismissed Mr. Duggan’s case, saying that the error was an “innocent inadvertence and inattention to detail,” and that it was at most of “peripheral evidential relevance.”
“I do not accept that it should be characterised as something more sinister,” Mr. Chen wrote.
“It is, in my respectful view, not open to characterise that matter as material in any sense.”
The AFP officer reasoned that he “erroneously assumed, or inferred” that Mr. Duggan was the director of the company, and did not realise his mistake until the defence brought it up in correspondence.
The judge also dismissed Mr. Duggan’s “ultimate submission” that a foreign entity—the United States—was “seeking to restrain a real property of a corporate entity that has committed a crime.”
Family ‘Devastated’
Mrs. Duggan said the family was “extremely disappointed and devastated” by the decision.“These orders place a dark cloud over the futures of six Australian children. It will also make it very difficult for us to fight for justice for my beloved husband who has been locked up in solitary confinement without local charges for almost 14 months.
“We not only face a second Christmas without Dan; this decision makes it near impossible for us to fight for his freedom.”
She alleges that Mr. Duggan has been caught up in a politically motivated case that was part of the United States’ now-disgraced “China Initiative,” which has been criticised by the U.S. Congress, academia, civil rights groups, and Asian American communities.
Laws to be Tightened to Stop Former Defence Staff Training Foreign Personnel
In September, Defence Minister Richard Marles introduced the Safeguarding Australia’s Military Secrets Bill, which will strengthen criminal laws to ban Australian defence personnel from providing military training to a foreign government.
However, Australia’s Five Eyes intelligence partners—Britain, the United States, New Zealand, and Canada—will be exempt from the new law.
Under the proposed bill, a ban will be applied to any Australians offering military training to countries seen as a national security risk; a penalty of 20 years in prison is also on the cards for those found guilty.
Australian citizens or permanent residents engaged in training foreign personnel will need to obtain authorisation.
“Australians who work or have worked in Defence who come into possession of the nation’s secrets have an obligation to maintain those secrets beyond their employment with the Commonwealth. This is an enduring obligation and to reveal any of those secrets is already a crime,” according to a government statement.
This came after a second former Australian-based pilot was investigated for allegedly training Chinese fighter pilots.
This pilot was chief operating officer at the Test Flying Academy of South Africa (TFASA), a flying academy that British authorities have warned is an intermediary for Beijing to recruit retired pilots.
