The Guardian - China-Bondi businessman accused of selling secrets to China can only be accused of plagiarism lawyers argue

Lawyers for a Bondi businessman accused of selling Australian secrets to China say simple artificial intelligence tools used to check for plagiarism at universities verified his claim he only provided publicly available information.

Alexander Csergo watched on via video link from Sydney’s Parklea prison on Wednesday as prosecutors told Downing Centre local court they would ask the federal attorney general’s department if it wanted to continue his case.

Csergo has been held in prison on remand after he was arrested in Bondi in April. He was the first person in Australia to be charged with reckless foreign interference, an offence created as part of a suite of national security laws introduced in 2018.

The 55-year-old is alleged to have swapped reports on business and politics with two Chinese handlers, known to him by their anglicised names of Ken and Evelyn, in exchange for envelopes of cash while he was living in Shanghai during the pandemic.

His barrister, Bernard Collaery, told the court on Wednesday it should be obvious to police the 13 reports Csergo gave the Chinese were derived from open source material “with some of his own commentary” added, rather than being classified information.

“Perhaps the only offence this man can be accused of is plagiarism,” Collaery said.

“Because you could now do an AI search of where those 13 documents came from. I’ve had a young intern in our chambers check it as the kids can do at university.”

Collaery told the court his staff had gone through tens of thousands of pages of evidence that police had provided to the courts and had not found anything they could connect to any “sinister wrongdoing” by Csergo.

Csergo has previously told Australian police he believed he was being groomed by intelligence officers from China’s ministry of state security and provided anodyne reports to his handlers in an effort to placate them until he could escape China.

He told police he filled the reports with open source and occasionally fabricated information in the hopes of avoiding detention and being able to return to Sydney to see his elderly mother once the Covid-19 lockdown restrictions were lifted.

Asio raided Csergo’s mother’s Bondi home in February before he was arrested and charged two months later, shortly after he returned to Australia.

On Wednesday, his case was adjourned for a fourth time and pushed back by two weeks, meaning the commonwealth department of public prosecutions is likely to miss its six-month deadline for providing a full brief of evidence to the court.

Under New South Wales law, if that deadline is not met, the defence can apply for the charges to be dropped.

The lawyer for the commonwealth department of public prosecutions, Syed Shah, tried to get the deputy chief magistrate Sharon Freund to agree to a 10-week adjournment.

Shah told the court that prosecutors were waiting for the attorney general’s department to “consent” to continuing the prosecution given Csergo’s case was “very complex” and involved Australia’s first charge of reckless foreign interference.

Shah said the commonwealth department of public prosecutions was yet to submit its request for the attorney general’s department to reconsider the case and that it would require eight weeks to make a decision.

Freund pressed Shah on whether this meant Csergo’s charge could be withdrawn and ultimately agreed to Collaery’s request for an adjournment to 18 October.

Guardian Australia has sought comment from the office of the attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, who made an extraordinary intervention in Collaery’s own long-running criminal case last year to have the charges against the lawyer dropped.

Collaery had been facing jail after being charged with assisting his client, Witness K, to leak classified information about Australia’s alleged spying operation in East Timor in 2004.