Canterbury-Bankstown Mayor Khal Asfour has stepped down as a New South Wales Labor candidate after reports emerged about his lavish spending during a council trip in Tokyo.
The Daily Telegraph on Friday reported Asfour charged ratepayers $120 for a health spa treatment, claimed hundreds of dollars for alcohol and thousands of dollars for luxury clothing spent in Tokyo in 2015.
Asfour, who is set to be endorsed by Labor’s state conference in October to contest for the upper house at the state election in March 2023, pulled out of the race on Friday.
A spokesman for Asfour said, “the latest headlines are the last straw.”
“The mayor is vehemently denying any wrongdoing and has at all times adhered to the policy set by the council, a policy scrutinised by the office of local government.”
A spokesman said the claims were all within the rules and approved under the council’s policies.
The Labor leader, Chris Minns, said Asfour had made the right call to stand down and described the charges to ratepayers as unacceptable.
“Clothing allowances are generally for hard hats and personal protective equipment, not for clothes that you wear every day in your professional capacity.”
Minns, who previously defended Asfour from corruption allegations, said he only learned of the reports about Asfour’s expenses on Thursday.
“I didn’t know about this revelation. That’s obviously an important part of this in any political campaign,” Minns told reporters.
Previous Accusations Of Corruption
It comes five months after former Labor MP Tania Mihailuk, under parliamentary privilege, accused Asfour of committing corruption, linking him to disgraced former party powerbroker Eddie Obeid.Obeid was charged with the offence of misconduct in public office following an investigation by the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC). In 2021, he was found guilty of conspiring to grant a mining exploration licence in 2009, helping his family make $30 million from the deal.
Mihailuk alleged that Obeid went to Asfour’s wedding and adorned him with a “generous gift” while remaining committed to making sure he held the mayoral position during a period of major redevelopment.
“I raise my legitimate and longstanding concerns regarding Asfour’s character and his unprincipled actions in furthering the interests of developers and identities, in particular Eddie Obeid,” she told the NSW Parliament.
The speech prompted Asfour to deny the allegations.
“She has used parliamentary privilege to launch a cowardly attack on me and my family, and I call on her to produce evidence of any wrongdoing to the relevant bodies,” Asfour said a day after her speech to the New South Wales Parliament.
“She is citing matters from 2012. This reeks of sour grapes at being overlooked on Labor’s upper house ticket.”
Opposition leader Minns later dismissed Mihailuk’s comment and removed her from the shadow cabinet. She has recently joined One Nation.
Asfour was cleared of misconduct following an upper house inquiry late last year.
“Well done One Nation’s Tania Mihailuk, who blew the whistle on Khal Asfour, an act of honesty for which Chris Minns kicked her off the frontbench,” One Nation MP Mark Latham wrote in a Facebook post on Friday.
“Minns backed Asfour despite the obvious, gross misuse of ratepayers’ funds at Canterbury Bankstown.”
The Labor leader, Minns, insisted that “at the end of the day, you can’t say that you’ve got a concern about a candidate in relation to [property] developers, but then say, ‘What I really meant was that it was a concern about expenses.’”
Labor’s New Move
Following the revelation, the NSW Labor party will consider banning councillors from spending ratepayers’ cash on designer goods.“Expenses issues in councils in NSW are an issue,” Minns said.
“We want to look at them in government because I don’t think it’s appropriate to levy ratepayers to these charges.”
NSW premier Dominic Perrottet said he would also support a review of council spending.
“It clearly doesn’t pass the pub test,” he said.
“When you’re using taxpayer and ratepayer money, you need to do so prudently. There should be the highest standards in place.”
