Compassion
Mirabella in hot seat over QC lover's dying days
...it is now alleged, and what she had never admitted even to her family, was that Howard, 40 years her senior, was also her live-in lover for five years in the late 1990s...
...she had received gifts from him valued at well over $100,000 to help her election to Federal Parliament in 2001...
...she was the executor of his will and, his family believes, its sole beneficiary. If this is the case she stands to inherit Howard's $1 million house in a prime street in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton....
...she had also promised him that she'd employ him in her electorate office should she win the vote.
But soon after the election win in 2001 they began to grow apart...she is alleged to have told him, her backbencher's staff entitlement was not sufficient to employ him.
In 2002 Panopoulos met and formed a relationship with another man. Howard went back to his life. Always socially awkward, his circle shrunk to his two children and the owners of his local restaurant, Abla's.
In 2006, Panopoulos married Lieutenant-Colonel Greg Mirabella. Howard attended the Wangaratta wedding. But during Mervyn's family visit at Christmas 2006, he was given cause to worry. Colin told Mervyn he had given his former girlfriend a sum of money large enough that he had to cash in one of his pensions. The money, he said, was to help her buy a house because she and Greg could not afford it alone. Mervyn suspects, but does not know, that it was about $100,000. Further worrying Mervyn was his father's comment that Mirabella had asked him not to tell anyone about it...
http://www.smh.com.au/national/mirabella-in-hot-seat-over-qc-lovers-dying-days-20110922-1knct.html
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