Drug syndicate boss Emin Yavuz appeals against severity of MDMA importation sentence

Emin Oguz Yavuz was already serving time in Canberra's prison when he headed up an enterprise responsible for importing more than 1.7kg of pure MDMA to Australia in 2017.

When Youssef Jabal and Peter Poulakis travelled to the Alexander Maconochie Centre to visit him in September that year, he told Jabal, a builder who was a shareholder in a property development, to recover $50,000 he had invested in the project.

Yavuz tasked Poulakis with collecting this money from Jabal, and discussed with him how it could be used to purchase Bitcoin.

Poulakis, a Canberra cafe owner, ultimately converted the cash to cryptocurrency and ordered the drug consignment, via the internet, from a person known only as "Sock".

At least some of that $50,000 was used to finance the importation, but how much was actually paid for the MDMA remains unknown.

What is known is that by November 2017, Yavuz was regularly on the prison phone to Jabal, Poulakis and Bilal Omari to discuss matters relating to the consignment.

The drugs, addressed to a fictitious person called Michael Foster at the Australian National University, were due to be collected by Omari, who worked there at the time.

But the plan unravelled when the Australian Border Force intercepted the consignment, which was falsely labelled as containing a "camping pans set", when it arrived at a customs facility from the United Kingdom later that same month.

Yavuz eventually pleaded guilty to a charge of jointly importing a commercial quantity of a border-controlled drug.

In September 2020, Justice Chrissa Loukas-Karlsson sentenced him in the ACT Supreme Court to eight-and-a-half years in jail.

The judge made this term partially concurrent with the man's earlier sentence, and backdated it to begin in August 2018.

Unhappy about the severity of the penalty, Yavuz appeared in the ACT Court of Appeal on Thursday to challenge it.

His barrister, Andrew Norrie, conceded Yavuz had been at the top of the drug syndicate and that the man's crime was aggravated by the fact he committed it while in custody.

But Mr Norrie argued the sentence was "manifestly excessive" when compared to the penalty imposed on Poulakis, who was sentenced to five years and nine months over both the same importation and another consignment that contained more than 450g of MDMA.

Mr Norrie told the court that with his client's role limited to providing directions from behind bars, Poulakis was the "central connection" who made things happen outside the confines of Canberra's jail.

"Without the efforts of Mr Poulakis, the syndicate would not have functioned," he said.

While Mr Norrie argued the gulf between the pair's sentences was too great, barrister Chris O'Donnell SC, for the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, said Justice Loukas-Karlsson had based the penalties on "appropriate" findings.

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He said it had been open to the judge to determine, as she did, that Yavuz had "a somewhat greater role in directional-type behaviour" than Poulakis despite the latter also playing a leading part in the illegal enterprise.

Mr O'Donnell said this distinction, combined with the aggravating factor of Yavuz having offended while in custody, justified him receiving a sterner sentence than Poulakis.

Justice Michael Elkaim and Justice David Mossop heard the appeal arguments in person on Thursday, with Justice Katrina Banks-Smith joining via audio-visual link from Perth.

The trio reserved their decision.

"We need to think about it," Justice Elkaim told Yavuz, who is currently not eligible for parole until September 2023.

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