Industry insiders claim a scaffolding firm with a chequered past and links to organised crime was still able to secure promotion at the highest levels of the CFMEU.
A booming scaffolding firm that has secured significant contracts on the $550 million redevelopment of the nation’s war memorial, the Sydney Metro, a major hospital and a public school has been repeatedly promoted by the CFMEU, despite a catastrophic safety record and alleged links to a bikie boss and other underworld figures.
A NSW District Court judge found Synergy had “grossly overloaded” the scaffolding by more than 16 tonnes as it raced to complete the mega-residential project in Macquarie Park.“The offence is of the utmost objective gravity … should serve as a telling reminder that unsafe acts on a building site can and do lead to catastrophic consequences,” the judge found.
Mr Greenfield, the NSW union boss, publicly slammed the safety protocols at the Macquarie Park site after the 2019 tragedy and said there was “no excuse” for “a worker on a construction site to pass away because of money and a program”. Now SSS has plans to expand overseas after buying the Australian arm of Indian scaffolding giant Technocrat in 2021.
Synergy’s former director and operations manager at the time of Cassaniti’s death, Ali Hamka, was caught in the middle of a brutal gangland war between the Darwiche and Razzak families over drug supply in western Sydney in the early 2000s.In October 2003, four gunmen fired 100 shots into Mr Hamka’s fibro house in Greenacre, in Sydney’s west. Mr Hamka’s 22-year-old partner, Melissa Nemra, was killed, as was the target of the assassination, Ziad Razzak, who was on parole for drug-related offences.
Mr Hamka and Mr Soukie did not respond to requests for comment through their companies, SSS and Synergy Scaffolding. One of the companies that received payments from Synergy was GSP Projects, a labour and equipment hire company that had no employees and no assets, apart from a bank account.
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