Ben Roberts-Smith was eyeing business opportunities overseas before his arrest, but his partner says accused war criminal always intended to return home if charges were laid.

The former SAS soldier was arrested on April 7 and charged with murdering or ordering the murders of five unarmed detainees while deployed in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2012.

Roberts-Smith was released from prison on bail last Friday after his father Len Roberts-Smith, a former Western Australia Supreme Court judge, paid a $250,000 surety.

Documents from the 47-year-old’s bail hearing in Sydney’s Downing Centre Local Court released on Thursday detail plans made with his partner Sarah Matulin to open a business overseas.

In an affidavit filed with the court, Matulin wrote the couple had wanted to move out of Australia to create some normalcy in their lives, but Roberts-Smith had always intended to return if charged.

“We have never planned to run away from this and have always intended to face the criminal charges if they presented,” she wrote.

“We have had countless discussions that if he was ever requested to do so, he would hand himself into police custody voluntarily.”

In March 2023, Roberts-Smith contacted the chief executive of an outdoor weather protection company in Chiang Mai, Thailand, looking to meet business contacts over a beer.

Matulin wrote that by October, the couple had become serious about moving overseas, contacting a friend who owned an avocado farm in Myanmar to discuss opportunities.

Later that month, Roberts-Smith started inquiring about buying a fitness and wellness business in Spain, and began the visa process to move there.

Matulin said it was no secret they wanted to move to Spain because they had openly discussed it with family and friends.

In his own affidavit, Roberts-Smith said he had flown overseas 28 times since 2018 — including a taxpayer-funded trip to Britain for Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral in 2022.

He had always returned despite knowing he was being investigated for war crimes, he wrote.

His lawyer Karen Espiner revealed in another affidavit that she offered to have Roberts-Smith arrested by “appointment” by handing himself in at a police station if he was told he was going to be charged.

Espiner said Roberts-Smith did not tell the Office of the Special Investigator — which was probing the war crime allegations — of the Spain plans because there were no restrictions on his travel at the time.

Ben Roberts-Smith outside a Sydney police station on Monday. Photo: AAP

The Victoria Cross recipient has consistently proclaimed his innocence, including during a failed defamation action against publisher Nine over articles detailing alleged war crimes.

While the war veteran’s former employer Kerry Stokes had funded the defamation proceedings, Roberts-Smith revealed he had to liquidate all his assets to fund the later failed appeals.

His parents also coughed up $400,000 to pay for his legal costs, his affidavit says.

“I have no assets and my personal savings are significantly depleted,” he wrote.

Roberts-Smith gets a service pension of $4500 a fortnight, his affidavit says.

He is accused of machine-gunning an Afghan prisoner Mohammed Essa and ordering the execution of his son Ahmadullah to “blood the rookie” during a raid at a compound called Whiskey 108 in April 2009.

Ahmadullah had a prosthetic leg.

The then-SAS soldier put firearms on the men’s bodies to falsely claim they were enemy combatants, court documents allege.

In August 2012 at the village of Darwan, Roberts-Smith is accused of kicking a hand-cuffed Ali Jan off a 10-metre cliff before ordering that he be dragged over a creek bed and shot.

Two months later at Syahchow, he allegedly lined up two prisoners in a corn field, shooting one of them with another soldier.

He ordered a subordinate to shoot the other before throwing a grenade on the bodies to cover up what he had done, court documents say.

The matter returns to court on June 2.

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-AAP