Check out this guy who lied on his CV and then awarded contracts to family and mates. The NSW Health Department and five other employers all failed to check his dodgy CV. Does AI check credentials? Nope.
A former senior NSW Health employee will be referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions after he was found to have engaged in serious corruption, including faking his CVs and nepotism.
The Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) found Zoran Ribicic engaged in serious corrupt conduct over many years.
Mr Ribicic was the NSW Health director of engineering and asset management between 2021 and 2024.
ICAC claimed Mr Ribicic improperly awarded hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars to external contractors, including his sister Mirela Derrin’s company Risk Control Consulting (RCC).
ICAC found he also favoured RCC over competitors and never declared the conflict of interest.
An officer reported Mr Ribicic to ICAC in July 2024, and he was suspended with pay before he resigned in September that year.
Mr Ribicic was also found to have engaged in “order splitting”, according to the ICAC report.
He was authorised to approve quotes up to $30,000, and requested favoured suppliers to break much larger bodies of work into bundles below that amount.
This allowed him to engage his family and associates without the competition and oversight that would ordinarily apply to substantial contracts.
NSW ICAC Commissioner Helen Murrell said Mr Ribicic’s lack of qualifications to resolve these maintenance issues could have threatened the safety of patients.
“He was not qualified to deal with these problems,” she said. “The things that happened may well be because the whole thing was being managed by somebody who wasn’t qualified to do so.”
Mr Ribicic also deliberately failed to declare secondary employment with engineering and consulting firm Lanmar between 2023 and 2024.
He received $210,375 for 10 months’ work with the private company that he previously brought on as a consultant to ISLHD.
ICAC’s report states Mr Ribicic will be referred to the DPP to consider potential fraud offences after he made six job applications to government departments.
These applications contained fake qualifications and used false references to land public sector roles between 2012 and 2025.
He falsely stated he had a doctorate in business administration, a master’s degree in project management, a bachelor’s degree in engineering and a TAFE Engineering diploma.
The Health Department and five other employers all failed to detect his dishonesty and hired him over a decade.