Source : the age
Welcome to the Herald’s live coverage of the ICAC’s Operation Rosny public hearings. We’re half-way through week two, and today we’re expecting to hear from a key person of interest to the inquiry, Jean-Claude Perrottet.
I’m state politics reporter Jessica McSweeney, and along with the Herald’s team of senior writers I’ll be bringing all the latest news as it happens from inside the ICAC.
Before we get to today’s evidence, let’s take a look at what we covered yesterday:
- The Liberal Party’s most senior member in the upper house, Damien Tudehope, conceded he leaked a confidential draft report from a 2023 parliamentary inquiry to Jeremy Greenwood, a key witness who refused to give evidence. Greenwood is also a person of interest to this corruption inquiry.
- Tudehope told the commission yesterday he had a conversation with then-premier Dominic Perrottet about his younger brother, Jean-Claude, who was also avoiding giving evidence to the parliamentary inquiry. Tudehope said “I think he may have told me that he was in Fiji”.
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Tudehope said his son James, a Catholic Schools NSW staffer, was “agitated” after being pressured to pay invoices from Christian Ellis that he felt were “unjustified”. James is in New Zealand and has so far declined to return to Sydney for the corruption inquiry.
- The MP gave an impassioned defence of his friend, Michael O’Hara, and said he never thought O’Hara’s support of the Reformers could be considered a political donation.
- Tudehope told the commission that Jean-Claude Perrottet, who worked in his electoral and ministerial offices, had a “talent” for factional work.
You can follow today’s hearing through the live stream here.
The commission will spend the next two days hearing from Jean-Claude Perrottet, a person of interest to the ICAC and one of the key figures in the 2023 parliamentary inquiry.
We learned during the opening statement of counsel assisting Dr Peggy Dwyer, SC, that Perrottet was hunkering down in Fiji to avoid being summonsed to appear before the earlier inquiry, which was looking into illegal donations in the Hills Shire.
Jean-Claude, the younger brother of former premier Dominic Perrottet, was a key member of the Reformers, the religious right-wing factional group at the centre of this corruption inquiry. He also worked for Catholic Schools NSW and as a staffer for MP Damien Tudehope.
This corruption inquiry is investigating if he played a role in soliciting allegedly unlawful donations from prohibited donors. One of those was hotelier Michael O’Hara, who wrote the below email to Jean-Claude in response to an invoice.
Welcome to the Herald’s live coverage of the ICAC’s Operation Rosny public hearings. We’re half-way through week two, and today we’re expecting to hear from a key person of interest to the inquiry, Jean-Claude Perrottet.
I’m state politics reporter Jessica McSweeney, and along with the Herald’s team of senior writers I’ll be bringing all the latest news as it happens from inside the ICAC.
Before we get to today’s evidence, let’s take a look at what we covered yesterday:
- The Liberal Party’s most senior member in the upper house, Damien Tudehope, conceded he leaked a confidential draft report from a 2023 parliamentary inquiry to Jeremy Greenwood, a key witness who refused to give evidence. Greenwood is also a person of interest to this corruption inquiry.
- Tudehope told the commission yesterday he had a conversation with then-premier Dominic Perrottet about his younger brother, Jean-Claude, who was also avoiding giving evidence to the parliamentary inquiry. Tudehope said “I think he may have told me that he was in Fiji”.
-
Tudehope said his son James, a Catholic Schools NSW staffer, was “agitated” after being pressured to pay invoices from Christian Ellis that he felt were “unjustified”. James is in New Zealand and has so far declined to return to Sydney for the corruption inquiry.
- The MP gave an impassioned defence of his friend, Michael O’Hara, and said he never thought O’Hara’s support of the Reformers could be considered a political donation.
- Tudehope told the commission that Jean-Claude Perrottet, who worked in his electoral and ministerial offices, had a “talent” for factional work.
You can follow today’s hearing through the live stream here.
It was legendary journalist Alan Reid who coined the term “faceless men” to describe the 36 operatives who controlled the Australian Labor Party in 1963. Kevin Rudd then reintroduced the term to popular culture to label little-known powerbrokers plotting to dump him as prime minister.
If the NSW Liberal Party has its own faceless men, one is surely Damien Tudehope, the MP questioned by the ICAC on Tuesday over his close associations with six people at the heart of its latest inquiry. His appearance did not go well.
After a slow start earlier in the day, the dramatic closing hour of the hearing saw Tudehope confess to leaking a confidential parliamentary inquiry report into the links between Liberal Party figures and fugitive developer Jean Nassif. Tudehope sent the report to lobbyist Jeremy Greenwood, one of the key subjects of the 2023 parliamentary probe, well before the public got to see it.
“I thought he would have had an interest in that report,” Tudehope reluctantly explained. He had only moments earlier denied ever obtaining the draft document.
With so many twists and turns to this investigation, it can be easy to get lost in it all. On the first day of public hearings, counsel assisting the commission Dr Peggy Dwyer, SC, spent hours detailing the allegations and what she expects the evidence to show during these hearings.
Here are some highlights from that opening statement to, as the witnesses often say, “refresh your memory”.
