The price the NSW government paid to get rid of Chris Eccles, the Wolf of Macquarie St

WE can reveal the price the NSW government had to pay to dispose of Chris Eccles, Barry O’Farrell’s Director-General of Premier and Cabinet.

HE called himself “Mr Wolf” after the character in Pulp Fiction. Now we can reveal the price the NSW government had to pay to dispose of Chris Eccles, Barry O’Farrell’s Director-General of Premier and Cabinet, who used to joke his job was to clean up the bodies, when he ­resigned in June — a $343,095 payout.

Mr O’Farrell had signed Mr Eccles up to a five-year contract even though he was elected for a four-year term in 2011.

When Premier Mike Baird decided he did not want Mr Eccles as his “Sir Humphrey Appleby”, that entitled Mr Eccles to a payout up to 38 weeks of his $500,000-plus salary.

The state government argued last week that Mr ­Eccles’ payout was less than that given to former Directors-General Robyn Kruk and John Lee, both long-term NSW public servants, when Nathan Rees and Kristina Keneally became premiers respectively.

Mr Lee received a golden handshake of $363,000 in 2009 and Ms Kruk was paid out $373, 925 after being axed the previous year.

Mr Eccles confirmed he used to call himself “Mr Wolf” to government staffers.

“You have seen the movie? When I was explaining to people some part of what the role involved, there was a ­ proportion of the job which was just cleaning up stuff.”

Memorably, in the ­Quentin Tarantino classic, Mr Wolf said: “You got a corpse in a car minus a head in a garage. Take me to it.”

Mr Eccles defended his payout as his “entitlement”.

“It’s absolutely his [Mr Baird’s] prerogative to make the change and it’s my ­prerogative to [receive] my entitlement,” Mr Eccles said.

In 2011, Mr Eccles’ salary was raised to $532,490. As of July 1, 2014 the job’s salary was upgraded to $548,575.

The decision on the payout was determined by the Statutory and Other Offices Remuneration Tribunal.

Whenever former premier O’Farrell had an issue he tended to farm it out to Mr Eccles to provide an ­“independent” report.

Mr Eccles wrote the report that led to the forced resignation of former O’Farrell government staffer Peter Grimshaw after he was found to have forwarded Mr O’Farrell’s emails.

He also wrote the report that led to former Finance Minister Greg Pearce being sanctioned over his misuse of travel entitlements and sent on a month’s stress leave. Mr Pearce was eventually sacked by Mr O’Farrell over “jobs for the boys” revelations.

Mr Eccles — a former top bureaucrat from Victoria and head of the public service in South Australia before being recruited — was part of a powerful triumvirate in the O’Farrell government with Mr O’Farrell’s former chief of staff and now Woolworths lobbyist, Pete McConnell, and the premier himself.

When Mr O’Farrell ­resigned in April after giving false evidence to ICAC about a gift of a $3000 Penfolds Grange Hermitage wine from a donor, Mr Eccles was on leave in South America. Mr Baird announced Mr Eccles was standing down in June.