Icac: MP denies putting developer in touch with alleged slush fund
|
Version 0 of 1. A New South Wales Liberal MP has denied putting a property developer in touch with the alleged Liberal party slush fund at the centre of a corruption inquiry. In a brief but colourful appearance at the Independent Commission Against Corruption (Icac), upper house MP Marie Ficarra referred to her miniature schnauzer’s medical problems, a trip to the Cumberland state forest to buy a particular plant and, eventually, the matters at hand. Ficarra insisted she told property developer Tony Merhi in a March 2011 meeting that as a property developer, he was banned from donating to the party. She directed one of his non-prohibited friends to give money to the Young Liberals instead, she said. “He had plenty of friends who wanted to see the Liberal party win… It wasn’t anything sinister at all,” Ficarra said. Ficarra told the commission the meeting was held at a cafe in the Cumberland state forest because there was a garden nursery nearby. "I had to buy westringias,” she said. Earlier, Merhi had told the inquiry he had spoken to Ficarra about potential amendments to planning laws that could affect his business. He said Ficarra had told him he might need a lobbyist, and mentioned a company called Eightbyfive. Shortly after, a man called with the bank details for Eightbyfive, Merhi said. Records show a $5,000 donation was made by Merhi to the company in the following days. The commission is investigating allegations that Eightbyfive was a slush fund set up by a former Chris Hartcher staffer, Tim Koelma, to funnel illegal donations to the Liberal party. Donations from property developers have been banned in NSW since 2009. Ficarra stepped down from the party earlier this month after the corruption claims emerged. On Thursday, Ficarra said that after the meeting with Merhi, she had called a member of the Young Liberals, Charles Perrottet, to put him in touch with the property developer. Later that day, she said Merhi called with the account number Perrottet had passed on. “He had [been given] a strange account name,” she said. “I didn’t write it down, I can’t recall it, but it sounded a very weird account name. It wasn't like it was a suburb or a branch.” Getting “progressively angry”, Ficarra said she called Perrottet and asked him to “sort it out”. "[Perrottet] kept assuring me that the numbers he had given me were legitimate Liberal party accounts.” Perrottet has denied ever speaking to Merhi or passing onto him any account details. Counsel assisting, Geoffrey Watson SC, highlighted inconsistencies in the evidence Ficarra was giving compared with what she told Icac investigators when they interviewed her last July. On that occasion she told Icac she had been door-knocking in Mulgoa, in western Sydney, on the day of the meeting with Merhi. But phone records showed she had been in the southern Sydney suburb of Sylvania and then in the Cumberland state forest, before returning to Sylvania. "Is that because you're making this up as you go along?" Watson asked. "On the day, that's what I believed to be true,” Ficarra said, explaining she had been in Sylvania looking after her miniature schnauzer, Leisl. The dog had needed a full blood count from the vet. “It's not easy to take blood [from] a miniature schnauzer,” she said, to roaring laughter in the hearing room. Watson appeared momentarily thrown. Even Ficarra’s lawyer at one stage asked her to stop interrupting. The weary counsel assisting began a new line of inquiry, then thought better of it. “I'm going to suggest to you that you're fibbing. You knew that you'd made a blunder in your evidence. You knew that it wasn't sufficient for you to have merely got a non-prohibited donor to come ... Oh, I'm so sorry, I've put that poorly. Let's start again tomorrow,” Watson said. Ficarra’s evidence resumes on Friday morning. |