Gladys Berejiklian goes for walk with partner Arthur Moses after tough day at ICAC

Former premier Gladys Berejiklian has emerged from her Northbridge home after an excruciating day at the ICAC inquiry. Check out the pictures.

Former premier Gladys Berejiklian has emerged from her Northbridge home after an excruciating day at the ICAC inquiry on Friday.

Berejiklian has spent the morning at the gym with her solicitor partner Arthur Moses.

Gladys Berejiklian goes for an early morning walk after a brutal day at ICAC.. Pictures by Julian Andrews.

The former premier spent about an hour at the gym with Mr Moses before the pair went for a stroll in Northbridge.

Mr Moses represented Ms Berejiklian in last year’s ICAC investigation into Daryl Maguire.

Dressed in active wear Ms Berejiklian was all smiles despite her tough ICAC hearing, saying hello to passers-by who greeted her warmly.

Gladys Berejiklian with her partner Arthur Moses. Picture: Julian Andrews.

Ms Berejiklian spent Friday being cross-examined about the nature of her relationship with the disgraced Daryl Maguire as part of ICAC’s inquiry into their roles into seeking and approving grants in Maguire’s electorate of Wagga.

The first is $5.5 million to the Australian Clay Target Association, which the ICAC has previously heard later employed Maguire’s company for a minor commission.

Gladys Berejiklian will return to the ICAC hearing on Monday. Pictures by Julian Andrews.

The second grant was to the Riverina Conservatorium of Music, which reveived $10 million to relocated to govement owned premises and was earmarked to receive another $20 million for a world class recital hall.

The ICAC is also invbestigating whether she turned a blind eye to Maguire’s alleaged corruption in other business dealings.

Arthur Moses and Gladys Berejiklian in Northbridge. Pictures by Julian Andrews.

At Friday’s hearing the ICAC heard phone tap recordings between Ms Berejiklian and Mr Maguire which referred to Mr Moses.

Mr Maguire told Ms Berejiklian in 2018 he was summoned to ICAC and had asked Mr Moses to represent him.

“I went to that guy, and he said ‘look I’m busy’, Arthur Moses, and he got me this girl who’s dealt with all this s**t before,” Mr Maguire said in the 2018 phone call.

Family or love circle?

By Perry Duffin

When is someone so dear to you that they are “like family”, but are not so dear that they can’t be cherished like part of your family? It is, according to Gladys Berejiklian, when that someone is part of her “love circle.”

The former Premier danced around constant questions about her relationship with former beau Daryl Maguire at ICAC on Friday, finally accepting she thought of him “like family”, but insisting she still wouldn’t have told anyone about the relationship because it wasn’t “significant” enough.

The Commission opened on Friday with a simple question to her. Counsel Assisting Scott Robertson asked: “Ms Berejiklian, if you were able to have your time again, would you disclose your close personal relationship with Mr Maguire to your ministerial colleagues?”

Her secret former partner had one day earlier told the ICAC he loved Ms Berejiklian and he believed she loved him as well. The pair had discussed marriage and a family and he had a key to her home, he told the inquiry.

Maguire’s evidence was important because Ms Berejiklian had always maintained the relationship was not significant enough to tell her closest friends and family – let alone make an official disclosure to NSW parliament.

Former premier Gladys Berejiklian with disgraced MP Daryl Maguire

In her second public appearance at the corruption hearings she agreed the relationship possessed the “hallmarks” Maguire had described. But her position on sharing the relationship had not changed.

“I didn’t feel it was of sufficient standard or sufficient significance in order to (disclose it),” Ms Berejiklian responded on Friday.

Ms Berejiklian told the inquiry she had changed the locks to her house, rather than ask for the key back from her old flame. The ICAC has rejected claims by Ms Berejiklian’s lawyers that it was seeking to “plumb the depths” of the relationship and insisted the romance is of investigative importance.

The commission is investigating whether Ms Berejiklian, as Treasurer and Premier, turned a blind eye to Maguire’s corruption and gave his pet projects particular assistance in government.

Ms Berejiklian was asked more than 10 times on Friday whether she considered Maguire to be among her “family”. Each time she denied it but with a caveat – he was not her family in the eyes of the law, or under the ministerial code, she said.

Maguire would sometimes come down to Sydney without telling her, and he never met her family. They did not share finances or live together, and she doubted his commitment. But Counsel Assisting the Commission Scott Robertson persisted with the question.

“You are my family,” Ms Berejiklian had texted Maguire in early 2018, months before he was booted from parliament under suspicion of corruption. Eventually Ms Berejiklian agreed with the question: Maguire was “like family” but she saw it differently than a blood relation.

“I regarded him as a part of my love circle, part of people that I strongly cared for, but I wouldn’t have put him in the same category as my parents or my sisters,” she said.

It was a tough day for Gladys Berejiklian under the ICAC spotlight.

Phone intercepts have focused, in part, on the way Maguire “lobbied” Ms Berejiklian for projects in Wagga Wagga. He wanted to win re-election, he told her on one tapped call, but couldn’t get a massive hospital grant approved. Ms Berejiklian told him she’d secured him the $170m in a five minute call to then Treasurer Dominic Perrottet. Mr Perrottet is not accused of any wrongdoing.

“Can you please not get yourself worked up again because all you do is shout at me sometimes, Hokis,” she asked Maguire in the call.

“Some of our members now think they need to get everything on their wish list … if you add up all things in your electorate you can’t tell me you’ve been hard done by.”

In another call she spoke of lopping off the head of a NSW bureaucrat who had “fixed” Maguire’s pet project that has now landed them before the ICAC. Multiple bureaucrats have told the ICAC they would have treated Maguire’s multimillion-dollar grant requests differently when they allegedly came under “pressure” from Ms Berejiklian’s office, had they known about the relationship.

Ministers, too, said Ms Berejiklian was either facing a conflict of interest or it could have been perceived that way.

On Friday she denounced their “opinions”.

She said: “I was the only one that could determine what I felt about the status of that relationship.”