First person charged under Australia's foreign interference laws

abcnews.go.com:

Lawyers for the first person to be charged under Australia’s foreign interference laws have told a court that a hospital donation made through a federal government minister was not a covert attempt to curry favor on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party

MELBOURNE, Australia — Lawyers for the first person to be charged under Australia’s foreign interference laws insisted in court Friday that a donation to a hospital made via a federal government minister was not a covert attempt to curry favor on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.

Melbourne businessman and local community leader Di Sanh Duong, 68, has pleaded not guilty in the Victoria state County Court to a charge of preparing for or planning an act of foreign interference. Vietnam-born Duong, who came to Australia in 1980 as a refugee, faces a potential 10-year prison sentence if convicted in the landmark case.

He is the first person to be charged under federal laws created in 2018 that ban covert foreign interference in domestic politics and make industrial espionage for a foreign power a crime. The laws offended Australia’s most important trading partner, China, and accelerated a deterioration in bilateral relations.

The allegation centers on a novelty check that Duong handed then-Cabinet minister Alan Tudge at a media event in June 2020 as a donation toward the Royal Melbourne Hospital’s pandemic response.

The 37,450 Australian dollar (then equivalent to $25,800, now $24,200) donation had been raised from Melbourne’s local Chinese diaspora.

Defense lawyer Peter Chadwick told the jury Duong denied “in the strongest possible terms” prosecutors’ allegations that he had attempted to influence Tudge with the check. Duong was the local president of the community group