Melbourne construction company firebombed twice in a fortnight
A construction company's headquarters has been firebombed in the early hours of Tuesday, as a campaign of arson and intimidation continues to erupt in Victoria's building industry.
The company, El Dorado Contractors, based in Melbourne's west, has now been firebombed twice in a fortnight, but Tuesday's latest attack has done more damage than the first.
Fire crews and police are still at the scorched offices of the firm in Derrimut, but the attack will almost certainly be assigned to the Operation Hawk taskforce, the nascent police investigative team assigned the task of probing crime and corruption in the building industry.
Last week, this masthead revealed how a campaign of firebombings and intimidation had erupted in Victoria's construction sector as underworld players seek to control pockets of an industry supposedly being cleaned up by state and federal government reforms.
The campaign has intensified over recent weeks. Equipment on a Victorian government-backed social housing site was torched earlier this month and the family homes of major construction company directors were separately targeted in attacks involving arson or violent confrontation.
The ongoing attacks will raise serious questions for the state government and Victoria Police, which last year failed to assign detectives or adequate resources to investigate crime in the construction industry after the Building Bad investigation was published by this masthead and 60 Minutes.
In March, amid fresh reports of crime and corruption involving the building industry and the construction wing of the CFMEU, police scrambled to assign a small number of detectives to a taskforce codenamed 'Hawk'.
The firebombing attacks on Victorian construction sites began about 18 months ago but have intensified since the union was plunged into administration in August after the Building Bad reports.
This masthead has confirmed at least 11 arson attacks on construction firms since September 2023, although the true number is likely to be higher because some may not have been reported to police.
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