Page 620 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 12 April 1994
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Mr Berry: You did not write until 29 March.
MR HUMPHRIES: That is not true. Do get it through your thick head. The first time we wrote to them was on 29 March. We contacted them by telephone before that point. Moreover, Madam Speaker, what obligation is there on us to look to VITAB when information which was contradictory to that information came to us from more reliable sources such as the companies office of Vanuatu? The companies office of Vanuatu indicated that the directorship of VITAB was not as was told to us by the Minister. Are we really obliged to go and talk to VITAB to find out from them what the story is? Should not the Minister be able to tell this Assembly what the story is with a company with which he is dealing? I would have said so.
The Minister also asserted that Mr Dowd was in fact a shareholder of VITAB. He produced a short document, not dated, except for 10 October 1993, apparently transmitted to the ACT today. Was this the first information the Minister had, after five months of debate on this subject, to prove what he had been telling the house fairly desperately for the last four or five months about the directorship of VITAB? Is this the first piece of information he actually had to prove what he was saying?
I might ask: How do we know that the document is authentic? With great respect, VITAB is so incompetent, to put it very mildly, that it has not even bothered to update its company records six months after the supposed changes were made. It is so incompetent that it cannot do that. It has at least one director who has been charged with an SP bookmaking offence - the Government did not know about that, apparently - and we are asked to believe that this document is an accurate reflection of what was decided. If it is an accurate reflection of what was decided, why was it not transmitted to the companies office of Vanuatu? If you delay as long as that in advising the companies office in an Australian State that you have changed your directorship you will be up for a very hefty fine; you have broken the law. We do not know what the law in Vanuatu says about supplying changes of information. We can only assume that you are allowed to get away with much longer periods of not notifying changes in directorship or shareholding of companies in that jurisdiction.
I make this interesting observation as well, Madam Speaker: Why was the Government relying on the advice of VITAB, particularly when it is supposed to have solicited its own company searches? Price Waterhouse, we were told, repeatedly, did its own search. Did they not hold the two documents in the one hand, the presumably written advice at some point from VITAB saying that Mr Dowd is a director, and the same from Price Waterhouse - the reliable Price Waterhouse to which Mr Berry referred many times - and see that in fact Michael Dowd was not recorded as a director; it was Oak Ltd? That is a matter which has not been explained to this place. That, of course, is what we are saying in this motion; that Mr Berry misled. He was given opportunities to correct and did not bother to do so.
Putting aside the question of Mr Berry advising members of this place on the basis of advice from VITAB and ignoring other better advice that he had, contradictory advice, the question remains this: Did Mr Berry accurately state the position of the directorship of VITAB even if we assume that Michael Dowd was a director of VITAB? Did he accurately and truthfully state the position to this Assembly? The answer,
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