By Mark Russell
A FORMER senior official with the Australian embassy in Bangkok is facing life in prison if convicted of child sex charges in the Philippines.
Dr Marcus Hodge, 47, was allegedly caught having sex with a 12-year-old boy in his car in the basement of an apartment building in Manila's Makati City business district earlier this month.
The Sunday Age has confirmed Dr Hodge worked as an Immigration Department doctor for the Australian embassy from 1992 to '95 at a time when there were claims a pedophile ring allegedly involving Australian diplomats was operating overseas. One official, Robert Scoble, Australia's former deputy ambassador in Hanoi, used a diplomatic bag to send child pornography to a fellow diplomat.
The Commonwealth Pedophile Inquiry set up by the Federal Government to examine allegations against 10 department officers found that there was no cover-up of pedophile activities. It made no finding against Scoble, who denied being a pedophile and insisted the images, passed to him by a third party, had been circulated as an innocent joke.
Scoble was later found guilty in a separate case in 2004 of distributing pornography and given a four-month suspended jail sentence in Bangkok.
In May 2004, another former Australian diplomat, William Stuart Brown, hanged himself in a Bali cell after being sentenced to 13 years in jail for sexually abusing two children. And a former ambassador to Cambodia, John Holloway, had child sex charges against him thrown out of a Canberra court in 1996.
Both DFAT and the Department of Immigration and Citizenship told The Sunday Age that because of privacy issues they could not confirm if Dr Hodge had been investigated during the pedophile inquiry.
"In general terms, the department always takes allegations of misconduct by staff seriously and if there is any criminal conduct we would always refer that to the Federal Police," an Immigration Department spokesman said.
A Federal Police spokeswoman said officers did not discuss who they were investigating.
Dr Hodge, now the World Health Organisation's program and development operations officer at its Western Pacific regional office in Manila, was arrested on May 8 and accused of paying the boy the equivalent of $8 for sex.
He had been introduced to the boy as "Daddy".
A Filipino pimp, Wilson Culling, 21, was arrested with Dr Hodge. The head of the Makati City police investigation unit, Raul Castaneda, said arresting officers had acted on a tip-off that Culling prostituted the boy to Dr Hodge.
Culling had allegedly been one of Dr Hodge's former victims.
Since the pair's arrest, at least five other boys aged from 11 to 15 have come forward to claim they were procured by Culling to have sex with Dr Hodge and are now receiving counselling.
Dr Hodge has been charged with child sex offences and remanded in custody for a pre-trial hearing on June 16.
Sexual exploitation of a person under 18 is punishable by life imprisonment and a fine of up to five million pesos ($A134,663).
A Filipina politician, Emmylou Talino-Mendoza, has urged authorities to investigate if Dr Hodge had preyed on other children when working at WHO.
"Did the arrested sex offender, while conducting his job here at the WHO, have any direct contact with other children? Did he handle any child health programs? These matters need probing to ensure a sweeping criminal investigation," Ms Talino-Mendoza said.
Dr Hodge, from Sydney, has been based in Manila since 2002.