Not so happy snaps with Iwan Sunito for Gladys Berejiklian

Illustration: Rod Clement

So Gladys Berejiklian says she does not know who Iwan Sunito is.

Maybe.

But he sure knows who she is, along with a load of other Liberal Party luminaries in NSW.

For those who haven’t been keeping up, Sunito is a prominent Sydney property developer.

At ICAC on Monday, the NSW Premier was played a phone tap in which her secret boyfriend and former MP Daryl Maguire referred to a pending meeting request with the Premier from a man named “Sunito”.

“See you’re gonna get a meeting from ah, a request from Sunito as well,” Maguire said in a February 2018 call.

Counsel assisting Scott Robertson asked the Premier if she knew who Sunito was, to which she replied: “I don’t know”.

“Was Sunito one of the developers — to your knowledge — that Mr Maguire was attempting to assist in relation to deals and the like?” Robertson went on.

“No, he was not — not to my recollection,” the Premier said.

“I don’t know who that person is.”

Gladys Berejiklian walks with Iwan Sunito in December 2017.

But then emerged a picture of Berejiklian cutting a ribbon with Sunito at a building opening in December 2017, which was within three months of that tapped phone call.

And look.

Margin Call has found another happy snap of Berejiklian with the shiny-headed Sunito that same day, with the Premier smiling as she walks alongside the property developer she doesn’t know.

Sunito said at the time he was “graced by the presence of Premier of NSW @gladysberejiklian! What a historical moment”.

Seems Sunito has crossed paths with a few of Berejiklian’s Liberal friends, too.

Iwan Suntio in his office with Mike Baird in November 2018.

He was also at lunch in November 2015 with former NSW premier Nick Greiner, who has just wrapped up his time as federal president of the party. Sunito reckons Greiner is a “great leader”.

And then there’s Sunito in his office with another former Liberal state premier, Mike Baird, in November 2018, who the developer says is “the real deal”.

How good are happy snaps?

Tough job interview

Could the timing be any worse for John Horvath’s proposed re-election to the Helen Coonan-chaired Crown Resorts board next week?

The 76-year-old doctor was in the sights of Patricia Bergin’s counsel assisting Naomi Sharp on Wednesday at the gripping NSW gaming commission’s unfolding inquiry into the $6bn listed gambling giant.

Any shareholder watching — perhaps excluding 36 per cent investor James Packer, whose second wedding, to Erica Baxter in 2007, Horvath attended — would have to wonder why they’d vote in favour of the physician returning to the Crown board for yet another term.

Last month marked a decade that Horvath — who was the late Kerry Packer’s personal physician for a number of years, heading the team that oversaw his care, including assisting with oversight of the billionaire’s kidney transplant — has served on the Crown board.

The one-time commonwealth chief medical officer, who owns no Crown stock and doesn’t engage in any form of gambling, told the commission he considered himself “part of the chair’s board renewal program”.

John Horvath testifies at NSW inquiry into Crown Resorts

Horvath is paid about $310,000 a year for his work at the company, but admitted to Sharp he should have paid more attention to junket operators and disclosed he only completed the Crown training module on money-laundering two weeks ago.

“Perhaps in hindsight it would have been appropriate to do it earlier,” Horvath said.

The non-executive director admitted he’d only become aware of issues in Crown’s operation of junkets and treatment of money-laundering risks as the Bergin inquiry unfolded and accepted there were serious problems in these areas, as well as with governance procedures at the casino company.

Sharp’s questions were quite the prelude to next Thursday’s AGM.

Along with the professor’s enduring tenure with the group, a serious question remains over which Crown exec will survive evidence presented by Sharp and her colleagues for Bergin’s consideration.

Crown’s Australian resorts chief Barry Felsted, now CEO and before that CFO Ken Barton and chief legal officer Joshua Preston among others might already be tidying up their resumes.

Inside the tent

If Patricia Bergin’s recommendations out of the unfolding casino inquiry include a better-funded gaming regulator in NSW that bears sharper teeth, James Packer will have his old man’s doctor John Horvath to thank.

Bergin, a former NSW Supreme Court judge, in her own supplementary questioning managed to get Horvath to agree at the very tail end of his evidence that a better-funded and more powerful gaming regulator would absolutely be a welcome scenario for the controversial sector.

Drawing out Horvath’s experience in the regulation of medical practitioners, Bergin even talked about a regulatory model that embeds regulators inside licensed operators to keep watch on operations.

Too early for Crown to start allocating some office space for its regulatory masters?

Olive crush

When ex-waterfront boss-turned agribusiness investor Chris Corrigan became one of the 500 shareholders in Boundary Bend many years ago, he never would have imagined his olive farms would one day resemble a caravan park.

But that’s exactly what happened earlier this year across part of the 3500ha of neatly ordered olive trees in northwestern Victoria that produce the famed extra virgin olive oil, Cobram Estate, when Boundary Bend activated its COVID-19 emergency plan.

Its chairman Rob McGavin detailed at Wednesday’s Global Food Forum how the first wave of the virus hit right at harvest time.

Worried a case of COVID-19 among its harvest workforce would totally shut down operations when demand for its products was booming, McGavin hired 60 motor homes and set up a bunch of mobile kitchens that provided 67,000 meals by the end of the harvest, costing Boundary Bend a whopping $1.7m.

There was even an onsite medical centre with a registered nurse.

Technicians that usually come from Italy to help on the harvest were nowhere to be seen, McGavin also noted, which we assume meant the Italy-based Corrigan couldn’t come to town with his family as he has in the past at harvest time.

But then again, watching the headlines of the Crown inquiry, he’d probably have been happy to stay away.

In a brilliant piece of timing, Corrigan resigned as a director of James Packer’s gaming group at the end of 2013, just as things seemingly started to go awry inside Crown according to evidence given to the inquisition.