Political donations may have helped an illegal migrant with convictions linked to the Calabrian mafia overturn a deportation order, a media report has suggested.

Efforts to deport self-professed Melbourne mafia boss Frank Madafferi to Italy failed because his family lobbied the Liberal Party, a joint Fairfax-ABC investigation alleged.

On Monday night, the ABC Four Corners program said then Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock’s 1996 order to deport illegal migrant Madafferi was overturned by his replacement, Amanda Vanstone, in 2005, despite Madafferi’s convictions for violent and mafia-related offences in Calabria.

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When the Madafferi family failed in court to overturn the deportation, Frank’s brother Tony used businessmen connected with the Liberal Party’s Millennium Forum fundraising group as part of a political lobbying campaign, the program said.

Victorian MP Russell Broadbent refused to comment. Photo: AAP

It said NSW Liberal Senator Marise Payne, Victorian MP Russell Broadbent and NSW MP Bruce Billson were lobbied.

The program said all three in turn approached Ms Vanstone about the Madafferi case.

Tony Madafferi arranged a political fundraiser in Melbourne attended by all three where Ms Vanstone was guest speaker and Mr Madafferi personally donated $15,000 to the Millennium Forum, the program said.

In November 2005, Ms Vanstone overturned the deportation.

Ms Vanstone and the three MPs declined to comment to Four Corners, but said their intervention was based on humanitarian concerns about the deportation’s impact on the Madafferi family.

ICAC counsel assisting Geoffrey Watson SC and former Millennium Forum and Federal Liberal Party Treasurer Michael Yabsley have now both called for Australia’s political donation system to be overhauled, Fairfax Media reported.

Mr Watson, who led last year’s ICAC public hearings into the forum’s dealings with property developers, said the new revelations showed the entire fundraising system was “seriously” compromised.

And Mr Yabsley, who once chaired the Millennium Forum but who is not the figure involved in the Madafferi lobbying, said donations should be capped and all entities banned from making them.

“The system is wide open to the kind of abuse by criminals and their representatives,” Mr Yabsley told Fairfax Media.

“The more common problem is where donors actually have an expectation of some kind of policy or other outcome in view of their donation.”

– with AAP