Southsada Sananikone: 81-year-old drug trafficker loses bid to overturn conviction

Southsada Sananikone (right), pictured with daughter Mimi, was sentenced to three months' jail, recognised as time served on remand and a 12-month community corrections order with 50 hours of unpaid community work. Photo / Supplied

An elderly woman who claimed she had no idea she was helping her daughter run a lucrative dark web drug trafficking business has lost a bid to overturn her conviction.

Southsada Sananikone, 81, was sentenced to three months’ jail in August last year after a jury found her guilty on a single charge of trafficking illicit drugs.

Handing down the sentence, Judge Robyn Harper said while Sananikone maintained she was “oblivious”, she would be sentenced on the basis she was “wilfully blind” to her daughter’s drug trafficking empire.

But the Melbourne woman, who was shamed by her local Buddhist community after being charged by police, appealed her conviction to Victoria’s highest court.

During a hearing in August this year, Sananikone argued the jury had unreasonably rejected her claim to have not known what she was participating in was illegal activity.

The court was told that over a five-week period in early 2022, Sananikone mailed 396 packages on behalf of her daughter Mimi Sananikone, 49, at various AusPost post offices.

Police intercepted 255 packages, with each found to contain illicit drugs including methamphetamine, cocaine, MDMA, opium, testosterone and heroin.

The pair were arrested by police on February 23, 2023, and their Hughesdale home was searched.

Investigators found A$461,000 ($528,500) in cash, including $80,000 sitting out on a coffee table, and bulk drugs and drug packaging equipment hidden around their home.

In a police interview, Sananikone, through a translator, said she’d just left home to “go to work as usual”, but she didn’t know what was inside the packages.

“I just thought it was legal things. You know, I – I – this is a kind of job I – I do. I work. I don’t know anything in there,” she said.

The court was told Mimi Sananikone ran legitimate businesses out of the home, including the sale of tea, seaweed and fungi.

Sananikone’s lawyers argued these legitimate businesses gave rise to an explanation of her actions that was consistent with innocence – that she believed she was helping her daughter with legal work.

They argued there was no forensic link between Sananikone and the drugs and Mimi Sananikone had claimed “she kept her drug business well hidden from her mother”.

But handing down their decision in the Court of Appeal this month, Justices Lesley Taylor, Rowena Orr and Peter Kidd found Sananikone’s guilt was the “only reasonable inference open”.

The judges found the high volume of parcels movements and significant cash holdings left the jury entitled to come to the view Sananikone was trafficking drugs.

“These matters in combination led to the conclusion that the applicant was, at the very least, aware that the significant commercial enterprise traded in illicit substances and that she was wilfully blind to the risk that the packages contained drugs of dependence,” they wrote.

“The jury was entitled to think that any suggestion that the applicant’s daughter had amassed in excess of $450,000 cash from selling vast quantities of tea and fungi to family members and friends – and that the applicant could have thought this to be the case – was absurd.”

Mimi Sananikone is serving an 18-year sentence after pleading guilty to charges of drug trafficking, dealing with the proceeds of crime and possessing the identification information of others.

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