Page 656 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 12 April 1994
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It was not until February 1994 that I learnt from ACTTAB that they had commissioned Price Waterhouse to undertake the required company check in September 1993.
I also learnt at this time that they had not yet obtained the personal checks which I had requested in relation to its directors and shareholders.
That was quite categorical. The Minister also tabled a criminal indices check conducted by the AFP on Messrs Kolomanski, McMahon and Dowd which was received on 17 March. Madam Speaker, I remind the Minister of his remarks in the Assembly on 1 March - after February but before 17 March. On that day he said:
The bona fides have been checked by Price Waterhouse, an internationally registered company.
That is recorded on page 300 of Hansard. On 2 March he said:
The Price Waterhouse matter was arranged in terms of looking at the bona fides of the people - - -
That is on page 395. On the same day he also said:
Price Waterhouse, as I said yesterday, are an internationally recognised company and they were to look at the bona fides of the people involved in the company. My advice is that they did.
Madam Speaker, today Mr Berry admitted - on page 7 of his speech - that when he made these comments he knew that any personal checks, that is, establishing the bona fides of the people involved, had not yet been carried out by Price Waterhouse or anybody else. That is halfway down page 7 of his speech today. He told this Assembly in early March that he was satisfied that the people involved in VITAB had been checked out, yet he knew that they had not been. He admitted today that he knew that they had not been. Yet this afternoon he misled us again, because the results of those checks were known only on 17 March, more than two weeks after he claimed that the people involved had been vetted. Put simply, Minister, in February you asked for the checks to be done. That is your own statement. In the first week of March you said that they had been done, when your statement says that you had not got the results. The checks had not been done, and you misled the Assembly again today, to add to the previous times.
I note that Mr Berry made great play about the AFP check on VITAB's directors. Did he in fact bother to contact Victorian authorities? That is where he would have obtained information about the gaming charges laid against one of the directors in 1988. Knowing as he did that the addresses given by Dan Kolomanski and Con McMahon back in the middle of last year were Kew and Essendon in Victoria, surely a bona fides check should have taken place in that State at least. We have not misled the Assembly this
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