As corruption investigators put the finishing touches on a four-year probe codenamed Operation Rosny, one of their prime targets, Jeremy Greenwood, boarded a plane and dashed to the other side of the world.

After landing at Heathrow Airport in London, the 37-year-old lobbyist caught up with another person in the sights of the Independent Commission Against Corruption, Christian Ellis. The friends and former business partners ultimately met four times – a detail the ICAC presumably knows because it either had them followed or tapped their phones – as the British capital sweated through England’s hottest June on record.

Ellis had moved to London in January this year as the ICAC circled. “He’s an Anglophile. He’s always wanted to live there,” Greenwood explained of his friend’s decision. Ellis has declined to assist the ICAC as it unpicks a string of schemes that could involve serious corruption and breaches of the state’s donations laws.