Zoran Ribicic, a former senior NSW Health employee, was found by the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption to have engaged in serious corrupt conduct over many years, including order splitting, nepotism, falsifying qualifications and failing to declare conflicts of interest. ICAC said he will be referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions over potential fraud offences.
Who Had the Power
Ribicic held the NSW Health director of engineering and asset management role between 2021 and 2024. That position gave him the authority to approve quotes up to $30,000, and ICAC said he used that power to steer work away from ordinary competition and oversight. He requested favoured suppliers to break much larger bodies of work into bundles below that amount, a neat little trick that let him bring in family and associates without the scrutiny that should have followed substantial contracts.
ICAC said he improperly awarded hundreds of thousands of taxpayers' dollars to external contractors, including his sister Mirela Derrin's company Risk Control Consulting. The company received more than $275,000 in payments from Illawarra Shoalhaven Local Health District across a two-year period. ICAC found he favoured the company over competitors and never declared the conflict of interest to the district.
An Illawarra Shoalhaven Local Health District officer reported Ribicic to ICAC in July 2024, and he was suspended with pay before resigning in September that year. The district's own reporting is what brought the matter into the open. Not some grand internal cleanup. Not some heroic reform from above. A report from inside the machine.
Who Paid the Price
The money came from taxpayers, but the damage landed on patients and workers inside a strained public system. Ribicic told ICAC there were six critical maintenance issues that required attention after the COVID-19 pandemic. Those problems ranged from malfunctioning lifts and automatic doors to "having to shut down operating theatres because of condensation because cooling, and, and, and ventilation wasn't good enough".
NSW ICAC Commissioner Helen Murrell said Ribicic's lack of qualifications to resolve those 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."
That’s the hierarchy in plain sight. Decisions made at the top. Risk pushed downward. Patients and staff live with the consequences when management is handed to someone who, by Murrell's account, wasn't qualified to handle the job.
ICAC also found Ribicic deliberately failed to declare secondary employment with engineering and consulting firm Lanmar between 2023 and 2024, as required by Illawarra Shoalhaven Local Health District's code of conduct. He received $210,375 for 10 months' work with the private company that he previously brought on as a consultant to the district.
What the System Calls Oversight
The report said Ribicic will be referred to the DPP to consider potential fraud offences after he made six job applications to government departments. Those 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.
ICAC said Illawarra Shoalhaven Local Health District and five other employers all failed to detect his dishonesty and hired him over a decade. That’s not just one bad actor slipping through. It’s a whole chain of gatekeepers missing, or ignoring, the obvious while the paperwork kept moving.
Commissioner Murrell said the findings carry lessons for organisations to reduce corruption risk. The recommendations include stronger qualification verification processes, improved conflict of interest controls, enhanced procurement oversight and improved governance arrangements for consultants. She said ICAC would deliver training to public agencies like NSW Health in the coming months. "We'll be leveraging off this report to deliver education to numerous agencies across New South Wales," she said. "It's more important to educate these agencies so that this doesn't happen again or at least the risk of it is minimised."
Murrell would not comment on whether there were any pending ICAC investigations into Ribicic's dealings at other companies where he was previously employed, but said some of his actions may result in criminal charges. She praised the processes within Illawarra Shoalhaven Local Health District that led to the corruption being reported to ICAC. "It's really great when agencies suspect corrupt conduct and they report it to us," she said. "What we worry about is when the internal processes of an agency are such that suspected corrupt conduct is not reported to us, but it's a statutory requirement for it to be reported to us, and that is what happened here." ICAC said the district had been contacted for comment.
The report leaves the same stale lesson the powerful always try to package as reform: better controls, better training, better governance. Meanwhile, the public system was already being run by someone who could allegedly bend procurement, hide conflicts, and move money toward family and associates until an internal report finally forced the issue into the open.