Sydney lawyer Farshad Amirbeaggi walked into a police station in the middle of 2018 saying he feared for his life and told detectives he was being stood over by some big names in the criminal underworld.
The $160,000 debt dispute dated back to 2015 when Mr Battaglia's SX Projects construction business went into administration. According to documents before the court, he claimed he was owed the money for building work carried out on Mr Amirbeaggi's inner-city office and Birchgrove home.Mr Amirbeaggi disputed this, saying the construction work was done in kind for legal bills he was owed by Mr Battaglia over a five-year period.
In June 2018, Mr Amirbeaggi said he was visited in his office by Sydney construction figure Perry Condoleon who allegedly told him that the debt collection had now been passed on to another man, Abdul "Zee" Khan. Mr Condoleon allegedly said to Mr Amirbeaggi that, if he paid $30,000 - including a third of that for Mr Condoleon himself - he would arrange a meeting with Mr Khan and smooth it all over.
But the case against Mr Khan fell apart in the Downing Centre Local Court in March when Mr Amirbeaggi said he had never felt threatened. "The real problem is that it actually never disclosed a criminal offence. This came at high cost to Mr Khan who remained refused bail for nine months where his mental health languished and saw significant deterioration."