Disgraced MP Daryl Maguire’s role in Joel Fitzgibbon scandal revealed
Wagga Wagga’s Daryl Maguire, already a prime target to be ousted from parliament, is also linked to another political scandal.
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DISGRACED Wagga Wagga MP Daryl Maguire is the loneliest man in State Parliament.
Now Saturday Extra can tell the story of Maguire’s links to the Chinese business figures who played a key role in the political scandal involving Joel Fitzgibbon.
It’s been a long journey from Maguire’s entrance into politics nearly two decades ago — when he made a point of talking about his “humble beginnings” growing up in the bush.
In his maiden speech, the Hay-born Liberal MP spoke of his “true Outback Australian” father, a stockman/drover, who taught him many values — “to be honest, have respect, work hard … your word is your bond and you must earn people’s trust”.
Last week, under the intense spotlight of an ICAC grilling, he invoked his country origins again.
The 59-year-old government backbencher is in the middle of a political scandal for using his parliamentary position to tout for kickbacks from mega-wealthy Chinese property developers.
He was being grilled about a curious phrase he’d uttered during a secretly bugged mobile phone conversation.
“Can you do me a favour,” Maguire says to his friend and former Canterbury councillor Michael Hawatt on May 9, 2016.
“I, I need a few things to feed my friends.”
He goes on to say his “friends” — mammoth Chinese property developer Country Garden — need 30 projects that have been “DA approved ready to go”.
ICAC counsel assisting the commission David Buchanan SC asks about the word “feed”.
“When you use the word ‘feed’ my friends, you make it sound as if it’s a mercenary relationship or there’s a mercenary aspect to your relationship with Country Garden, don’t you?” Mr Buchanan says.
MORE: MP Daryl Maguire will quit Parliament
“I’m a bushy,” Maguire replies. “We tend to use words that may not be seen as in the correct, in the correct way, but bushies do that.”
Mr Buchanan: “The fact that the word might be used by bushies doesn’t deprive it of its mercenary connotations, Mr Maguire, does it? ‘Feed’ has mercenary connotations.”
Maguire answered feed was a better word than “use, deliver or supply”.
Earlier Maguire was asked what he meant by “friend” and his relationship with Country Garden, which is 57 per cent owned by Yang Huiyan, 36, whose net worth is calculated to be $22.9 billion on Forbes’ 2018 billionaire rich list.
“I think it’s just a terminology that I use. I, I tend to speak in a bit of a bushy sense, so … I’m known to do,” Maguire said.
Eventually Maguire answered to the commission that his efforts on behalf of the property developers were actually a “money-making exercise”, not just a case of helping friends, after being played the tapes where he discusses his cut of a deal, which would have been worth millions.
To parliamentarians and his electorate alike, the revelations about Maguire, a quiet, unassuming country backbencher and father of two, were a bombshell.
MORE: ICAC insider says Wagga MP paid $13,755 a month while he refuses to quit
The recorded conversations of Maguire also include his boasts of “a big network” among the Chinese community and being involved in the opening of the Australia Business Trade Centre in Shanghai.
In fact he’s the honorary chairman of the centre, his pecuniary interests show. And he’s also a chairman of the Schenzen Asia Pacific Commercial Development Association.
Chinese companies, governments and associations have all helped kick in contributions to some of his regular jaunts there, his pecuniary interests show.
At one point around Parliament Maguire was nicknamed “Mr China” for his connections to the Chinese community and trips.
Last week he told ICAC he had very good links with China, “developed from my early days”.
“He’s really flown under the radar here,” one government MP said.
“He’s not really had many friends, but has been known as a pest for pushing projects and meetings with ministers.”
Maguire was also known to stand up in the Liberal Party room and complain about not getting meetings with ministers.
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In fact, in one of the secret recordings played to the hearing, Maguire boasts of having spoken to the office of Local Government Minister Paul O’Toole in a bid to parachute Hawatt onto an advisory committee for a new council.
And even Premier Gladys Berejiklian was hit with questions in Parliament earlier this year after attending a meeting brokered by Maguire.
The Wagga meeting was with two publicans with criminal records for arson and insurance fraud, as well as illegally owning poker machines.
Berejiklian didn’t know the individuals at all.
Evidence given to the ICAC shows Maguire putting himself forward as a broker to Chinese developers.
He says when Country Garden first arrived in Australia they “did everything wrong … made errors of judgment, tried to do things, I guess, the Chinese way, doesn’t work, so they were in all sorts of problems, in my opinion”.
ICAC’s explosive revelations have also brought into question Maguire’s previous work promoting a massive $400 million Chinese trade centre in his electorate of Wagga, which The Daily Telegraph revealed this week.
Maguire spent a decade trying to get the project off the ground, but it failed in 2013, with a council report citing concerns over a “lack of transparency”.
A Chinese state-owned company, Wuai, along with ACA Capital Investments, were behind the project.
ACA Capital Investments, located at the time in the MLC Centre in Martin Place, a stone’s throw from State Parliament, had assisted Maguire’s visit to China in August 2002.
One of the company directors, Humphrey Jian Xu, 57, originally from Guangdong, had previously attracted headlines over another political scandal — the “Fitzgibbon Liu Affair”.
Xu is the former business partner and boyfriend of ALP donor Helen Liu, whose friendship with federal Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon and donations towards his trips to China made headlines in 2009 and contributed to him losing his front bench position.
Xu also contributed to those trips.
In September 2013 the immigration department launched an investigation into residency allegations involving both Xu and Liu, sparking local headlines in Wagga.
Weeks later the council pulled the plug on the Chinese trade centre project.
All week both Coalition, independent and ALP politicians have mounted pressure on Maguire to resign from his safe seat, with the National Party hoping to field a candidate.
In December last year Maguire stepped down from being a joint director of his family company, Maguire Trading, handing sole control to his wife Maureen.
The address of the business, listed in his disclosure records as being for “superannuation investment”, also changed, going from Wagga to Noosaville.
In one of the phone intercepts, he’s recorded saying he’s “settling” some of his own property and changing the structure of his superannuation.
“ … my position is … that if Country Garden decides that they want a strategic policy engagement director, well, I’m it and they can pay my company,” he says in June 2016.
“But the work has to be done by some others at lengths or at arm’s length.”
Yesterday Country Garden issued a statement saying it had investigated the matter and “found nothing to support any suggestion that former or current CGA employees entered into any arrangements or agreements with Mr Maguire, nor made any payment to Mr Maguire”.
“Additionally, CGA has not acquired any land in the Canterbury Council region.”