A former Australian National University staffer will spend at least one extra year behind bars after prosecutors successfully argued he had not been punished adequately for his role in a party drug importation syndicate.
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In 2021, Justice Chrissa Loukas-Karlsson sentenced Bilal Badr-Eddeen Omari to three years in jail for trafficking in cocaine and jointly importing a commercial quantity of MDMA.
The ACT Supreme Court judge ordered that the man be released on a $1000 recognisance after serving the 15 months of the term that related to the trafficking charge.
Commonwealth prosecutors took issue with this in the ACT Court of Appeal last November, arguing the sentence imposed on Omari was "manifestly inadequate".
Three judges of that court agreed on Monday, saying it was not reasonable to let Omari out of jail without him doing any stand-alone time for the "serious" importation offence.
Justice Loukas-Karlsson had ordered that most of Omari's jail time for this crime be suspended after he had served a portion of it concurrently with his sentence for trafficking.
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Declaring this an error, Justice Michael Elkaim, Justice David Mossop and Justice Katrina Banks-Smith re-sentenced Omari on Monday to four years and five months behind bars.
They set non-parole periods expiring in May 2023, by which time the man will have been in custody for two years and three months.
The appeal decision is the latest chapter in the protracted case of Omari, who was arrested and charged in December 2017.
He has previously admitted he got "sucked in" by the "fake glamour" associated with drugs the previous year, when he began hanging around with a "so-called cool crew".
He quickly found himself "surrounded by cars, girls, drugs and a lavish lifestyle".
"I felt like I had won the lottery ... you feel like royalty," he said in a letter of apology tendered at his sentencing.
Omari became involved with a syndicate, headed up by sentenced prisoner Emin Oguz Yavuz and cafe owner Peter Poulakis, which imported MDMA twice in November 2017.
After more than 450g of that drug arrived from Germany in the first consignment, nearly 1.8kg followed in a package from the United Kingdom.
The deliveries were addressed to fictitious people at the ANU, where Omari worked in the College of Business and Economics at the time.
A courier unsuccessfully tried to deliver the first consignment, which ended up sitting at a DHL facility until it was seized by police.
The second package was, meanwhile, intercepted by the Australian Border Force on its way into the country.
The cocaine trafficking charge related to police finding more than 33 grams of that drug, along with paraphernalia and more than $12,000 in cash, in a Jeep that Omari had been observed driving in December 2017.
Omari was not the only member of the importation syndicate to receive bad news in the Court of Appeal on Monday.
The three judges who re-sentenced him also rejected Yavuz's bid to have his sentence for importing MDMA reduced.
Yavuz will become eligible for parole in September 2023.
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