ICAC: Ex-NSW Labor boss Jamie Clements organised Bill Shorten, Huang Xiangmo meeting
Former NSW Labor boss Jamie Clements has vehemently denied claims a Chinese billionaire handed him a bag stuffed with $100,000 but sipped grange with the tycoon and set up a meeting with Bill Shorten in the weeks following a suspicious fundraising dinner.
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Former NSW Labor boss Jamie Clements has vehemently denied claims a Chinese billionaire handed him a bag stuffed with $100,000 but sipped grange with the tycoon and set up a meeting with Bill Shorten in the weeks following a suspicious fundraising dinner.
The former Labor General Secretary said his predecessor, Sam Dastyari, “badgered” him to meet the controversial political donor.
Mr Clements spent Thursday again being grilled over whether he was handed a cash-stuffed ALDI bag by Huang Xiangmo on either April 7 or 8, 2015.
The billionaire and the former Labor general secretary both deny the allegation.
But the ICAC has previously heard from Labor staffer Kendrick Cheah that Mr Huang personally delivered the money in the shopping bag to Mr Clements following the Chinese Friends of Labor fundraiser that March.
The inquiry is investigating whether NSW Labor officials schemed to disguise Mr Huang as the true source of the $100,000 donation to the party using a racket of “straw” or fake donors.
But, before Mr Huang allegedly paid the party, Mr Clements and Lower House MP Ernest Wong visited the tycoon’s multimillion-dollar Mosman mansion three days after the Chinese Friends of Labor dinner.
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The three had tea and, later at lunch, Mr Clements asked about the wine selection.
“I remember we were drinking grange, and I don’t understand why they don’t drink white wine with seafood,” he told the ICAC on Thursday.
On April 7 Mr Huang met with Mr Clements in Labor’s Sussex Street office.
It’s been alleged that was the meeting at which the ALDI bag changed hands.
But Mr Clements said Mr Huang simply wanted him to set up a meeting with then Federal leader Bill Shorten.
“(I was asked) could I facilitate that, I said ‘yes of course’,” Mr Clements recalled.
“I believe I called Mr Shorten while they were sitting there.”
Mr Clements repeatedly denied the money changed hands in the meeting.
“I deny it on my oath,” he said.
Mr Clements could not rule out Mr Huang gave him a gift at the April 7 meeting but maintained he did not receive the bag of cash.
Two days after the meeting the $100,000 was banked into his party’s accounts — half into a NSW Labor bank account, the other half in a Country Labor account.
Mr Huang’s meeting with Mr Shorten took place at one of the billionaire’s Chinatown haunts — Master Ken’s Seafood Restaurant — some weeks later, he added.
The Labor chiefs sat in one room with the Chinese billionaire and his translator while Mr Shorten’s staff sipped grange in an adjacent tea room.
The objective was to get Mr Shorten to help the billionaire connect with Victorian Labor Premier Daniel Andrews ahead of a Chinese delegation which visited the southern state later that year.
Mr Clements, contradicting Mr Cheah’s evidence, said he only became aware $100,000 had been deposited into the party’s accounts through the course of the ICAC investigation.
He broke down briefly on the stand recounting how he wracked his brain, while already battling depression and paranoia, for memories about the ALDI bag.
“I was thinking maybe, in some alternate universe, I’d forgotten something like this,” he said.
“But sitting here today, in the mental position I am now, there’s no way.”
The former Labor leader, under fiery cross examination by ALP’s lawyer Arthur Moses, said he was introduced to Mr Huang by Mr Dastyari.
“I don’t recall if Sam was there in first meeting or Ernest (Wong),” Mr Clements said.
“But I know Sam kept badgering me to meet him.”
Mr Dastyari would ultimately bow out of politics in late 2017 after he allegedly warned Mr Huang that security agencies may be bugging his phone.
Mr Clements, yesterday, detailed how his “friendship” with Mr Huang blossomed after the pair met.
Mr Clements was under police investigation for sexual harassment claims from his office in mid-2015.
He had stood aside from his position when Mr Huang, in August, allegedly asked to meet him at his Mosman mansion.
He said Mr Huang handed him $35,000 in a wine box to pay his legal bills that arose from the allegations.
“I honestly thought when I took that money I wasn’t going back to general secretary,” he said on Thursday.
The August wine box was not the first time Mr Clements had received money.
He recounted, in May 2015, when Mr Huang’s assistant Tim Xu visited the head office with an envelope containing $10,000 in cash.
Mr Clements had asked the billionaire for money to pay for stamps to help a right-wing Union leader facing an election challenge.
Mr Moses said the Labor Party had “no visibility” on whether or not Mr Clements was acting in the interest of the billionaire after he took the money.
“You may for all intents and purposes be his stooge,” Mr Moses said, before Mr Clement’s lawyer objected — saying the commission was “descending into personal abuse”.
Mr Huang — a property developer who has since been exiled from Australia — was banned from donating.
Mr Clements will face further cross examination on Friday.