AND SO … it comes to pass.

Today in Justice Dane Tuiqereqere’s High Court No.13 we will understand the fate of the Commission of Inquiry – one of the most extraordinary legal and political chapters in Fiji’s history.

There are three separate parties who petitioned for the judicial reviews of the COI Report after they were ‘adversely named’ in it: Barbara Malimali; Graham Leung; and Wylie Clarke and Laurel Vaurasi.

Malimali and Leung lost their jobs directly as a consequence of the COI Report.

All three sets of petitioners, as well as the State, acting on behalf of the COI, have the right to appeal whatever is Tuiqereqere’s decision.

To paraphrase another writer: this may not be the end but it may be the beginning of the end.

I would not want to predict Tuiqereqere’s decision.

But on this significant date – just to contribute one final piece of the jigsaw.

Attached below is a copy of the police report I made on the subject of David Ashton-Lewis.

It was dated August 11 – almost exactly one year ago today – which seems like serendipity.

I had never filed a police report before. But I was requested to by the Chief Registrar, writing on behalf of the Judicial Services Commission, after I brought to the JSC’s attention Ashton-Lewis’s dodgy CV.

Only 18 months previously, the JSC had approved the appointment of David Ashton-Lewis to the Fiji Supreme Court even though Ashton-Lewis’ last judicial service ‘on the bench’ was 1995 – 28 years earlier.

Ashton-Lewis’s career after he left Fiji in 1995, a year before his term concluded, was almost 20 years in corporate law.

This included Ashton-Lewis’s employment as general counsel to Professional Investment Services [PIS] who sunk millions in client money into a number of failed investments including the infamous Westpoint collapse.

This and other similar schemes relied on complex and controversial ‘mezzanine’ financing, the cash for which was provided by high-pressure sales teams [supposedly supervised and regulated by Ashton-Lewis and his officers] who were often found to be taking commission both from customers and developers.

All that was missing from the CV that Ashton-Lewis sent to the JSC – no reference whatsoever to Professional Investment Services for instance.

And no reference to the long-running legal fights that PIS and its ownership had with the Australian financial regulator, ASIC, and ASIC’s adverse findings.

What Ashton-Lewis did reveal in the judicial CV sent to the JSC contained at least three major falsehoods:

– that he was entitled to use the letters ‘SC’ after his name indicating he was raised to the status of a silk, as Senior Counsel

– that at the time he was applying for the Supreme Court, he was an adjunct law professor and

– that he had been honoured by the late Queen for services to the law

On August 11 my police complaint was emailed to CID.

Victor Lal of Fijileaks made a similar police complaint to CID on September 7 and a supplementary complaint on September 13.

Lal’s focus was more on exposing the lie that Ashton-Lewis had ever been honoured by the late Queen [whose name he spelt Elisabeth in his CV – a sure tell of a wrong’un].

Ultimately, the police submitted mine and Victor’s files to the ODPP and any other research they had done, and the ODPP decided in January this year not to prosecute Ashton-Lewis.

That he was claiming honours and titles that were plainly false remains true. I called him a conman. Alex VB complained to FICAC because calling him a conman was mean; even FICAC didn’t think it was worth investigating.

The ODPP’s decision is their prerogative and I have no issue with that.

Despite his CV [and whatever we discover from Tuiqereqere’s judgement today], Ashton-Lewis is still a Fiji Supreme Court judge.

It’s an honour he clearly luxuriates in – see The Judge on 4CRB – but he has not been assigned any Supreme Court cases, not one, since his peculiar elevation to Fiji’s apex court.

The JSC has made no move [that I am aware of] to put him in front of a tribunal of his judicial peers to investigate his CV.

That’s the JSC’s responsibility: to make peace with history, their consciences and the precedent that this conman’s accession to the pinnacle of Fiji law sets for all time.

My conscience is clear. I did what I felt was my duty as a citizen to do by filing the police report.

My thinking was there was no point clanging away like an empty vessel on the social-media sidelines and refusing to help when the police come to you for assistance.

What Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka would have been hoping for from his pal Ashton-Lewis, in exchange literally for the millions he handed over to him and Janet Mason [who Ashton-Lewis insisted was a ‘KC’ when she never was], was a Commission that was at the very least a reliable and fair custodian of the legal process.

Maybe, Rabuka might be willing to accept, the COI Report reached conclusions that were a bit of a reach.

But at least, the PM would have expected, his pal Ashton-Lewis could be trusted to run the COI on a legally sound and fair, and professional basis.

That’s the crux of what Tuiqereqere is being asked to rule on today: was the whole thing fair to those adversely named?

Ashton-Lewis looked like he was a judge from central casting: his waistcoat, fob watch and old-world affectations.

But he was a woefully out of touch and hadn’t been a judge running a court room, let alone a Commission of Inquiry, since the year before John Howard became Australian PM

It always struck me as unlikely that Ashton-Lewis managed to do something with the COI – keep everything straight, fair and legal – that he couldn’t even manage with his own CV.

Anyway, the police report is interesting.

It explains how it was all thanks to Vilisi Nadaku uploading Amani Bale’s video testimony which I watched one early morning while staying with my mother.

I was hopelessly jet-lagged and looking for something to send me back to sleep.

But Amani Bale’s testimony – and Ashton-Lewis’ appalling rudeness to him – set in motion something of a personal mission.

I began to ask questions about a judicial figure who has caused Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka one High Court catastrophe after another, and sucked the air of the Fiji Government’s tires.