Coal wage theft. BHP’s solicitor MinterEllison faces conflict of interest claim
· Michael West
The coal miner being sued by BHP has asked the Federal Court to remove a MinterEllison solicitor who is also a witness to the case. Michael West reports.
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Michael West Media is being dragged into Court this Friday by BHP, the largest mining company in the world, on a claim of breaching confidentiality orders. MWM rejects this claim.
BHP has built its case to silence us on the sworn word of its own solicitor Trent Forno of MinterEllison. On Friday, the coal miner Simon Turner moved to have the solicitor removed on grounds of conflict of interest. BHP is seeking to have a number of stories on this website and Youtube videos on The West Report taken down which relate to a meeting held with Turner, BHP, Minter Ellison and a representative for One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts.
Trent Forno of MinterEllison was at this meeting. The question Simon Turner has now put before the Court is: can the lawyer whose sworn account is the foundation of BHP’s case also be the lawyer who runs the case?
Questions were put to MinterEllison managing partner Virginia Briggs regarding the conflict of interest. No response was forthcoming prior to publication of this story.
David v Goliath
When a $300 billion mining company makes a case to silence a journalist and a man with no income, Simon Turner, and builds it on the sworn word of its own lawyer, it creates a problem that no amount of money can fix. On Friday afternoon, Simon Turner put that problem before her Honour Justice Needham who is to hear the case.
Turner — self-represented, classified Totally and Permanently Disabled since 2017, sleeping on the floor of his mother’s garage — filed an interlocutory application asking the Federal Court to restrain BHP’s solicitor, Minter Ellison partner Trent Forno, and his firm, from continuing to act for BHP in the case.
BHP’s silencing application is supported by an affidavit affirmed by Trent Forno on May 6, 2026. According to Turner’s application, the single paragraph in that affidavit that goes to the central question in the case is paragraph 19, in which Mr Forno deposes, of his own knowledge as a participant at a conciliation conference held on June 7, 2024, that no one alerted him to the fact that the conference was being recorded.
That conference — held over Microsoft Teams — is the heart of the dispute. Present, according to court filings, were Tom Hunter-Leahy and Lachlan Apps (the solicitors then acting for Turner), Sophie Croft and John Hickey (BHP), Trent Forno (Minter Ellison, for BHP), Turner himself, and Hugh Carter, General Counsel to Senator Malcolm Roberts.
Simon Turner’s application contends that Trent Forno’s account in paragraph 19 is contradicted by the contemporaneous transcript of that very conference. According to the application, the transcript records the recording being announced on its first page, before Trent Forno’s first contribution, and records Forno himself proposing the “without prejudice” ground rules while the recording continued.
Whether that one paragraph can stand is now the central contested question in the case. Answering it means weighing the reliability of BHP’s own lawyer’s sworn evidence.
You cannot be the witness and run the trial
That, Mr Turner argues, is where BHP has a problem that money cannot fix. His application invokes rule 27 of the Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules 2012, which deals with the position of a solicitor who is also a witness, and the Court’s long-standing power to supervise its own officers.
He relies on the leading authority, Kallinicos v Hunt, in which the test was framed as whether a fair-minded, reasonably informed member of the public would conclude that the proper administration of justice required that a lawyer not continue to act.
A person cannot, the argument runs, be at once the key witness whose word is in issue, the partner of the firm on the record, the author of the letters to the judge, and the architect of the case.
The roles are incompatible.
Notably, Simon Turner’s application makes no allegation against Trent Forno personally. The point, he says, is structural, not an accusation. It is “the unavoidable consequence” of BHP’s own choice to commence the proceeding, to build it on Trent Forno’s affidavit, and to put the events of June 7, 2024 squarely in issue.
The application asks the Court to restrain Trent Forno from acting; to restrain Minter Ellison; or, failing that, to allow the firm to continue only if an independent solicitor, who had nothing to do with the May 6 affidavit, took over the case and Trent Forno steps out of it altogether.
Turner says he gave Forno and Minter Ellison the chance to consider their position before filing, and that the application was brought only because that opportunity was not taken.
“He started it”
“He started it,” Mr Turner said. “BHP chose to bring this case, and they chose to build it on their own lawyer’s affidavit. You cannot start a fight on your own sworn evidence and then run from being tested on it. I make no allegation about Mr Forno as a person. I am saying he cannot be the witness and the lawyer in the same case.
“That is the rule, and it is there for a reason.”
The timing matters The application lands a week after BHP and MinterEllison tried, and failed, to have the silencing case heard on an urgent basis. Late on May 15, Justice Needham declined to list it urgently, and the matter remains on its orderly course: a first case management hearing at 10am on Thursday May 29 in the Federal Court .
Mr Turner had already filed a cross-claim against BHP and its labour-hire entities, on 13 May 2026 — before BHP’s failed urgency bid.
Suppression efforts
That cross-claim alleges, among other things, fraud upon the Federal Court of Australia. BHP, through Trent Forno, has since foreshadowed an application to suppress the cross-claim, and a bid to strike it out by reference to an earlier judgment of Justice Needham from February.
Turner’s position, set out in correspondence to the Court, is that the February judgment never considered the June 7, 2024 transcript at all, and so cannot be used to shut down a cross-claim built on it.
Underneath the procedural skirmishing is the story this masthead has followed since the case began: a worker who says he was employed by labour-hire firm Chandler Macleod, but whose settlement deeds named a different entity, Ready Workforce; who says he was classified as an “office worker” on around $28,000 a year after breaking his back at a coal mine; and a wider workforce that advocates say could number in the thousands, with entitlements potentially running to the billions.
BHP would prefer the Court to be looking at the journalism. Simon Turner has just asked it to look at the lawyer.
Michael West is the founding editor of Michael West Media. Westpub Pty Ltd is the Second Respondent in proceeding NSD 752 of 2026 in the Federal Court of Australia. This article reports the contents of an interlocutory application filed by Mr Turner; the allegations described are those made in that application and have not been determined by the Court. Mr Turner’s application states that he makes no allegation against Mr Forno personally.