Melbourne drug kingpin Tony Mokbel will spend less time behind bars, partly because of injuries he sustained during a prison attack.
Mokbel put forward a bid for re-sentencing in Victoria’s Court of Appeal after one of his previous drug convictions was quashed due to the Lawyer X scandal.
Justice Karin Emerton on Tuesday varied the 30-year jail term handed to Mokbel in 2012 and he was instead sentenced to 26 years.
A non-parole period of 20 years was reduced from an initial 22 years.
Ongoing injuries from a serious prison assault formed part of the reason Mokbel’s sentence was reduced, Justice Emerton said
The 57-year-old was in a coma for 24 days after two 21-year-old prisoners assaulted him in Barwon in 2019.
Mokbel continues to suffer the effects of a traumatic brain injury stemming from the attack, his barrister Julie Condon KC told the court last month.
He also suffered two heart attacks in March and April last year and then underwent stent surgery.
Mokbel was rushed to hospital last week but appeared in court via video link on Tuesday.
The 57-year-old, dressed in a dark suit and tie, remained quiet as Justice Emerton delivered her judgment.
Mokbel was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison in July 2012 after pleading guilty to three counts of drug trafficking.
Six years earlier, he had been convicted and sentenced to 12 years jail for importing a commercial quantity of cocaine from Mexico.
Mokbel did not appear in court for that sentence, instead he hid in rural Victoria for eight months before fleeing to Greece in a yacht from Western Australia.
He was eventually arrested in a cafe in Athens in June 2007 and was extradited back to Melbourne almost a year later.
Mokbel tried to appeal his convictions, arguing it was illegal for him to be extradited to Australia before his appeal to the European Court of Human Rights was finalised.
Those bids were unsuccessful but his 2006 conviction was ultimately quashed by the appeal court in December 2020 after his former lawyer Nicola Gobbo was revealed to be a police informer.
– AAP
