Source : the age
As corruption investigators put the finishing touches on a four-year probe codenamed Operation Rosny, one of their prime targets, Jeremy Greenwood, boarded a plane and dashed to the other side of the world.
After landing at Heathrow Airport in London, the 37-year-old lobbyist caught up with another person in the sights of the Independent Commission Against Corruption, Christian Ellis. The friends and former business partners ultimately met four times – a detail the ICAC presumably knows because it either had them followed or tapped their phones – as the British capital sweated through England’s hottest June on record.
Ellis had moved to London in January this year as the ICAC circled. “He’s an Anglophile. He’s always wanted to live there,” Greenwood explained of his friend’s decision. Ellis has declined to assist the ICAC as it unpicks a string of schemes that could involve serious corruption and breaches of the state’s donations laws.
Read more from Bevan Shields here.
Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the ICAC’s Operation Rosny hearings.
I’m senior writer Alexandra Smith, and along with my fellow senior writers, I’ll be bringing you all the news as it happens in the hearing room. Today we will continue to hear from Jeremy Greenwood, a lobbyist and Liberal Party figure who also refused to give evidence before a 2023 parliamentary inquiry looking into illegal donations in the Hills.
Before Greenwood continues his evidence, let’s take a look at what we covered on Monday:
- Much of the questioning was focused on invoices paid to Greenwood and Christian Ellis’ company Beckington from Catholic Schools NSW. Greenwood repeatedly told the commission he could not recall what work had been done for the schools body to justify monthly invoices.
- Greenwood had no memory of any arrangements in place between Catholic Schools NSW boss Dallas McInerney and Beckington after being shown invoices dated a month before his company had pitched its services to the schools body, and texts dated before Beckington was established.
- Greenwood told the commission he wanted his friends to slow down their work with the Reformers after the factional group became “toxic”, and said their activities started to negatively impact his work.
- During a tense exchange when Greenwood repeatedly said he could not recall any details of work his company did for Catholic Schools NSW to justify the invoices, he suggested Dwyer put the questions to James Tudehope or Ellis, both of whom are out of the country and have so far refused to appear before the inquiry. Dwyer said it was “inconvenient for the public” that no one could answer questions about how this money was used.
