"Double Standards?" you decide

BANK FREEZE HYPOCRITICAL: BANDIT

MICHAEL HOPKIN
David Everett, the former SAS soldier turned violent criminal who has become one of the first targets of tough new rules to prevent criminals profiting from their crimes, has accused authorities of unfairly singling him out for special treatment.

WA Director of Public Prosecutions Robert Cock last month won the right to freeze Mr Everett’s bank accounts and confiscate his property to stop him benefiting from his new memoir, Shadow Warrior.

But Mr Everett claimed yesterday he made no money from the book, and that he had not been served with the correct papers to contest the ruling.

He now faces losing his property outright if he does not meet a 28-day deadline to appeal, the papers for which have not yet been delivered from the WA DPP to his Canberra home. The first he knew of the action was when he was refused money at a bank on Wednesday last week, leaving him unable to buy medication for a recent foot operation, he told The West Australian.

He is now relying on military pension payments.

Mr Everett spent a decade in jail after leaving the SAS and embarking on a spree of robberies and kidnappings in the 1990s.

He said he did not receive royalties from Penguin for Shadow Warrior, and that he donated all money from publicity appearances to charities to aid military veterans and the Karen people of Burma.

“They have frozen my life, not seized book profits — there aren’t any to seize,” he said. “A simple call to the publishers would have cleared it all

up. I have no contract with them, I haven’t signed anything.”

Mr Everett also asked why other former WA criminals — such as convicted fraudsters Alan Bond and George Brownrigg, both of whom have published memoirs — have not received the same treatment. “These blokes haven’t been touched. If you’ve got a law in place everybody should be subject to it,” he said. “It appears to be a selective process of hanging me out for special treatment.”

“I have no difficulty with the principle that people should not profit from their crimes.”

But he said authorities should “do a bit of simple investigation before they just freeze the income of a pensioner”.

Mr Cock refused to comment on other potential cases, but said a police investigation was under way to determine how much money Mr Everett had made from the book.

The procedure was to freeze assets if the Supreme Court believed there was reasonable suspicion a former criminal was profiting from past crimes. If Mr Everett was not making royalties from the book, those details would be established in due course, Mr Cock said.