By Megan Gorrey
A former Sydney council contractor has denied helping adjust quotes for a long-time friend whose construction company won multiple local government projects worth tens of thousands of dollars.
The NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption is investigating the conduct of former Canterbury-Bankstown Council contractor Pietro Cossu and council ex-employee Benjamin Webb.
Former Canterbury-Bankstown Council contractor Pietro Cossu gives evidence at ICAC on Monday.Credit: ICAC
Operation Mantis is examining allegations Cossu and Webb favoured a company, General Works and Construction, when awarding council contracts for financial benefits between mid-2020 and 2022.
It is also scrutinising whether the two men used a second company, PMLV Invest and Const Pty Ltd, to supply subcontractors to the council via two recruiters without declaring a financial interest.
The inquiry has heard Cossu, who was contracted as the council’s construction team leader, spoke with General Works and Construction owner Jeremy Clarke, whom he met on the B-Line bus corridor project in 2018, about picking up council contracts during an infrastructure boom in 2020.
It has also heard allegations Cossu changed, or suggested changes, to some of the quotes Clarke sent him for council projects before he formally submitted the quote to the council.
In one instance, Clarke sent a quote of $16,890 for cooling tower works at Bankstown library to Cossu’s business email address. Phone records showed the pair spoke twice that day, before Clarke sent Cossu a quote for $27,890 for the same job to Cossu’s council email address four hours later.
Counsel assisting the commission, Georgia Huxley, asked Cossu in the witness box on Monday whether he had told Clarke which numbers to include in the revised quote.
“I was probably asking him if he put everything in the quote … if he forgot anything.”
The inquiry heard many individual items in GWAC’s quote were cheaper than those in another quote Cossu had received from another company, Steelbiz. Cossu denied he had told Clarke which figures to include to “undercut” the rival quote.
A contract awarded to a company to install a cooling tower at the Bankstown Library and Knowledge Centre has come under the spotlight of the corruption inquiry.Credit: Kate Geraghty
Huxley said: “It just happens that the figures he nominates in his quote are slightly cheaper than the figures Steelbiz nominates in its quote?”
Cossu replied: “It looks like it.”
GWAC was later awarded the contract for the cooling tower works on Cossu’s recommendation.
Asked whether he told anyone on the council he had helped Clarke prepare the quote, he said: “No because I didn’t help him.”
Cossu said he was “sure” he would have disclosed his long-standing friendship with Clarke to the council at the time and he “was not keeping [it] as a secret”. He described him as “a very good man”.
Giving evidence last week, Jeremy Clarke was asked whether Cossu told him he would help Clarke win contracts with the council. Clarke said he had been “looking for [Cossu] to help me”.
“I hadn’t dealt with local government before, so, you know, I was obviously hoping that his guidance would help me to get work within the council.”
In cross-examination on Friday, barrister Arthur Moses, SC, asked Clarke whether Cossu had changed some of the draft quotes he prepared for council jobs so that Cossu “could get his cut of the action”.
“That’s basically it, isn’t it? I mean let’s be blunt about it rather than dancing around the edges,” Moses said.
Clarke replied: “I assume that was what he was doing, yes.”
The inquiry has previously been told Cossu and Webb, who was manager of the council’s works and projects unit, had supplied about 26 subcontractors to work on council projects via two recruitment agencies, Randstad and Spinifex Recruiting, but paid them significantly less than they billed the council between 2020 and 2022.
The agencies paid PMLV more than $7 million for the subcontractors, but PMLV paid the workers only about $2.6 million, netting the duo’s company a potential profit of about $4 million.
Webb will provide evidence later this week.
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