Hello and welcome to the third week of our live coverage of the ICAC’s Operation Rosny.
I’m state political reporter Jessica McSweeney, and along with the Herald’s senior writers, I’ll be bringing you all the news as it happens in the hearing room. Today we are expecting 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 begins his evidence, let’s take a look at what we covered last week:
- Robert Assaf, a founding member of the religious factional group the Reformers, was paid $135,000 a year to work at Catholic Schools NSW, where he would sometimes do Liberal Party factional work during 9-5 hours. Fellow Reformer Jean-Claude Perrottet felt he wasn’t being fairly compensated for his factional work, while Assaf received “$135k for Rob to work for faction”, texts revealed.
- Intercepted phone calls between Jean-Claude Perrottet and Jean Nassif were played to the commission on Thursday, revealing the property developer had offered $100,000 to support an unnamed Perrottet brother in a preselection. In another call, after Dominic Perrottet became premier in October 2021, Nassif asked Jean-Claude to “take a message to Charlie or to Dom – the building commissioner, we need to stop him”. This was part of his alleged campaign to have David Chandler removed from the role.
- Jean-Claude Perrottet said Nassif’s claims were “nonsense” and denied knowing about any untoward relationship between Nassif and his brother, Charles.
- Jean-Claude Perrottet received regular $5000 payments from Beckington, the company set up by Jeremy Greenwood and Christian Ellis, which held Catholic Schools NSW and hotelier Michael O’Hara as clients. Perrottet couldn’t remember what work he did to justify what counsel assisting Juliet Curtin described as “substantial injections of cash”.
- Liberal shadow attorney-general Damien Tudehope, who has stood down from the frontbench, admitted he leaked a confidential draft report into illegal donations in the Hills to one of the key witnesses who had gone to lengths to avoid the inquiry, Jeremy Greenwood.