There was no sign of the owner of Crazy for Candy, a lolly shop in Westfield shopping centre at Burwood, on Tuesday. Proprietor Joe Tripodi is one of the three former Labor ministers who the day before had been charged with misconduct in public office.
Along with Tripodi, 54, his co-accused include former planning minister Tony Kelly, 73, and the currently incarcerated Eddie Obeid, 78. Also facing court is Kelly’s former chief of staff Gilbert “Laurie” Brown.
The Crazy for Candy store in Westfield Burwood is owned by Joe Tripodi.Credit: Nick Moir
Rather than confectionery, it was a hamburger that Tripodi was clutching when he turned up – supposedly unannounced – at Kelly’s Wellington property on March 10, 2013. As he left Sydney at 8.05am, Tripodi turned off his mobile phone. He didn’t turn it back on until he returned to Sydney at 6.25pm, having completed a 340-kilometre round trip.
As Tripodi would later recount, he undertook the almost 11-hour drive merely on a whim, with the pair enjoying a half-hour discussion about lucerne and hay, exchanging gossip about what their former colleagues were up in the two years that had passed since Labor was swept from office in NSW, and only briefly mentioning a cabinet minute.
Only weeks earlier this masthead had revealed that the Independent Commission Against Corruption had executed search warrants in relation to Australian Water Holdings (AWH), yet another company in which the family of Eddie Obeid was believed to have a secret interest.
Of particular interest to the corruption watchdog was the discovery of an altered cabinet minute which, if accepted, would have delivered at least $60 million into the Obeid family coffers.
Facing charges: Former Labor ministers Eddie Obeid, Joe Tripodi and Tony Kelly.Credit: Dean Sewell, Rob Homer
The allegedly doctored minute had been signed by then-infrastructure minister Kelly in May 2010. It painted a glowing picture of the water company and recommended a billion-dollar public-private partnership in which the NSW government would pay AWH to provide water infrastructure to western Sydney.
However, the original minute, which had been written by Brian McGlynn, an expert retained by the Department of Premier and Cabinet, had recommended the complete opposite. McGlynn had noted that AWH had assets worth only $36 and the partnership would be an extremely poor deal for the people of NSW.
Whoever had altered the original cabinet minute to reverse the negative recommendation had used software to erase the metadata and history of the document so the authors of the changes could not be detected. But ICAC investigators were on the trail.
As the public hearings into AWH unfolded throughout 2014 more startling details emerged about the allegedly altered document.
Tony Kelly enters ICAC in 2014 to give evidence about an allegedly doctored cabinet minute. Credit: Nick Moir
In a tense morning in the witness box in April 2014, Kelly admitted he signed off on the cabinet minute favouring the company linked to the Obeids but he said the minute was drafted by his then-Labor colleague Joe Tripodi.
“Do you accept that the cabinet minute which you signed contained highly misleading information?” asked counsel assisting Geoffrey Watson, SC.
Kelly conceded the cabinet minute “could have contained more information”.
He also told the inquiry that although Tripodi had arrived unannounced at his farm the previous year, Kelly invited him in because “that’s what country people do”.
He claimed while his former colleague was keen to talk about a new interest in “lucerne farming,” most of the chat was about what their former parliamentary colleagues were doing post politics.
Kelly claimed only one or two minutes of their half-hour conversation concerned the cabinet minute.
Tripodi, he recalled, said to him, “What’s your memory of it, you know how the cabinet minute come about?”
Kelly said he replied: “Well, my memory is that you and [staffers] Laurie [Brown], Claudia [Certoma] and yourself put it together.”
From left, lawyer Nick di Girolamo, Moses Obeid, Eddie Obeid jnr, lawyer Tim Breene (back) and Paul Obeid at the Supreme Court for their unsuccessful battle against ICAC.Credit: Peter Rae
Brown told the inquiry that Eddie Obeid gave him the phone number of Nick Di Girolamo, AWH’s chief executive. He said he spoke to Di Girolamo only once but records indicated that between March and July 2010 there’d been seven phone calls and several meetings between the pair.
Di Girolamo, a lawyer, has since been representing members of the Obeid family.
The inquiry also heard the changes to the minute had been made on the computer of Claudia Certoma, who’d been a policy adviser to Tripodi before joining Kelly’s office. Certoma agreed Tripodi had been “assisting” AWH and that it was likely Kelly and Brown had ordered the rewriting of the minute.
In his evidence, Tripodi denied any involvement in the doctored cabinet minute. He claimed he had merely provided Kelly’s staff with some draft notes he had from his time as the previous infrastructure minister. He also claimed he had no idea the Obeids had an interest in AWH.
“On one occasion, I said to him, ‘Eddie, you and your family don’t have any commercial interest in this?’ He said, ‘No, no, [Eddie Obeid] junior’s giving Australian Water a hand up in Queensland,’” Tripodi recalled.
And as to the reason his phone was switched off during the entirety of his lightning trip to Wellington and back, Tripodi told the inquiry: “Um, my, my telephone – just let me think about it. My telephone was off that day but it wasn’t, it was actually in the car. I remember it was, I remember it was an issue driving out there because I didn’t have my, I thought I didn’t have my phone, it was in the car in the back seat and it was off, yes.”
Although his LinkedIn profile indicates Kelly is a farmer specialising in “lucerne and vegetables,” local council sources indicate the former planning minister has been working as a “development consultant”. One of his clients is Traders in Purple, a property developer run by George Geagea and Charles Daoud. Along with the NSW Land and Housing Corporation, the company has a $112 million housing project, Kamira Court, in Villawood.
In June 2021, Kelly registered a company called LETMETHINKABOUTIT.
He and the other three men have each been charged with an offence of misconduct in public office in relation to the alleged doctoring of the cabinet minute. The matters are listed at Downing Centre Local Court on August 25, at which point it will be known whether the men intend to defend the charges.
Calls by the Herald to Tripodi and Kelly on Tuesday went unanswered.
With Amelia McGuire
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