Businessman David Campbell says he has brought a lot of containers full of expensive material into Australia, but not a haul of nearly a tonne of cocaine worth more than a billion dollars that he’s accused of.
Now facing the possibility of life in prison, Campbell told a Sydney court on Monday he was scammed in a “disaster” caused by an overlooked typo.
Messages he sent and payments he authorised as he tried to track down a missing shipping container are part of the accusation the 53-year-old conspired to import a commercial quantity of a border-controlled drug in 2017.
Campbell said he was trying to track down a shipment of steel, which he did not know had cocaine secreted inside, and was concerned a container he expected had apparently gone missing.
“I’ve brought in a lot of containers that had a lot of expensive material in them … the insurance is expensive,” he told the court.
Campbell is standing trial alongside Tristan Waters, 40, after being dramatically arrested in a Serbian hotel in January 2018.
Waters has pleaded guilty to conspiring to possess a commercial quantity of an unlawfully imported border-controlled drug, but not guilty to the import charge.
Their lawyers have described both men as expendable pawns acting under duress, exploited by organised criminals and the police pursuing them.
Campbell thought he was sending money to a China-based steel company he’d previously done business with, to pay for an order made by a long-term business partner and mentor, resulting in “disaster”.
He had overlooked a misspelled email address mimicking theirs, thinking it was genuine as the sender knew so many specifics.
“The information they knew about was phenomenally accurate,” he told the jury.
He believed the other business had been hacked.
His barrister Ronald Driels asked if Campbell thought he had been scammed.
“Oh I know I was scammed,” Campbell said.
Campbell said he later suggested involving federal police in conversations searching for the container which did not arrive.
That container and 917kg of pure cocaine allegedly inside it had already been found by authorities at Sydney's Port Botany, who set up an undercover operation spanning multiple countries, culminating in the arrests in Serbia.
More than five years later, the circumstantial case is before a NSW District Court jury.
The trial continues on Tuesday.
