Clive Palmer drafts former AG Christian Porter to lodge international lawsuit against Australia for $300b

Clive Palmer has extraordinarily drafted former attorney-general Christian Porter to lodge an international lawsuit against Australia claiming the nation owes him almost $300 billion in damages. Mr Palmer’s Singapore-based company, Zeph Investments, lodged the lawsuit under international trade law on Tuesday, claiming he is owed US$198,202,414,285 in damages — plus interest and costs — related to his massive iron ore project in the Pilbara. That works out to more than $297 billion in Australian dollars or nearly 10 times as much as the $32 billion in damages he tried to prise from the WA Government three years earlier. The notice of arbitration exclusively obtained by The West Australian lists Mr Porter – who as Federal attorney-general initially joined the Commonwealth to back Mr Palmer’s case against the WA border closure during the pandemic – as the lead lawyer. There are another nine lawyers listed on the case, nearly all based in Brisbane, including Mr Palmer’s wife Anna Palmer. The documents also ask for responses to be directed to Mr Palmer’s “pilbera” Yahoo email address. It’s the latest in a string of lawsuits Mr Palmer has launched in an attempt to tear down a law that ended arbitration and absolved the State of any liability in relation to what he says was a breach of a long-term contract his company Mineralogy had for the iron ore project. He has already fought the law all the way to the High Court, which found it was constitutional. The notice claims Premier Mark McGowan and WA Attorney-General John Quigley and advisers came up with a plan “to effectively destroy (Mr Palmer’s) iron ore mining investments in Western Australia”. “The legislation, prepared in secret and passed under urgency, was less like a ‘Trojan horse’ and more like a ‘juggernaut destroying everything in its path’,” the document claims. “Australia bears responsibility for measures and actions undertaken by the Government of Western Australia.” The bulk of the damages claimed, more than $186 billion, are said to be for sovereign risk created after the WA laws “commercially destroyed the prospect of any future projects” for Mr Palmer. His claim says he would have been able to create another four projects under the original deals with WA. Zeph Investments is the Singapore-based parent company of Mineralogy, set up in 2019. The claim says the WA law breaches an ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand free trade deal that includes Singapore. The Government has 30 days to respond. Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has previously said he intended to “vigorously” fight the claim. “Mr Palmer likes to use expensive lawsuits to get his own way,” he said in October, recalling the challenge to WA’s border restrictions at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. When the possibility of an international lawsuit emerged last year, WA Attorney-General John Quigley said he was “shocked”, especially as nothing had changed since the High Court’s ruling. Mr Palmer wants the court case to take place in Geneva, whose neutrality he says is vital because of “the highly targeted and political nature” of the WA Government’s actions. However, he has invited the arbitrators to visit the port of Cape Preston, his Sino Iron project and subsidiary tenements and iron ore deposits in WA.