Daryl Maguire told Gladys Berejiklian to use a private phone and WeChat

Gladys Berejiklian’s secret love interest Daryl Maguire urged her to use a “private phone” and download WeChat after he was summonsed to ICAC.

Gladys Berejiklian left the ICAC hearing in Sydney on Monday, saying she would ‘get on with my life’ and denying wrongdoing. Picture: Getty Images

Gladys Berejiklian’s secret love interest Daryl Maguire urged the then NSW premier to use a “private phone” and download the WeChat messaging service days after he was summonsed to give evidence in a corruption inquiry.

“They can read texts but not the little green man, it leaves no trace,” Mr Maguire, then Wagga Wagga MP, told Ms Berejiklian in an apparent reference to the messaging service’s logo.

The Independent Commission Against Corruption, which concluded its public hearings on Monday, has been investigating whether Ms Berejiklian failed to disclose or ignored Mr Maguire’s alleged corrupt conduct.

“I assumed it was for privacy reasons,” Ms Berejiklian told the hearings when asked about the correspondence with Mr Maguire, conceding he “may have” sought to conceal his communications from investigations.

Ms Berejiklian, despite Mr Maguire’s urging, had not obtained the phone or download WeChat. She told the inquiry these requests were not enough for her to consider making a referral about Mr Maguire’s conduct.

Ms Berejiklian left the hearing at lunchtime on Monday, telling reporters she would “get on with my life” and denying wrongdoing.

Earlier in the day, Ms Berejiklian had been accused of lying to her most senior advisor about the extent of her relationship with Mr Maguire, and was accused by Commissioner Ruth McColl of potentially failing to disclose suspicions of his allegedly corrupt conduct.

She made allegations during Monday’s hearing, including that her relationship with Mr Maguire influenced her public duties, and that she knew of his alleged efforts to stop the integrity agency from monitoring his communications.

The climactic point of the hearing involved a sharp exchange with Ms McColl as she sought to unpack why Ms Berejiklian never made a referral to the ICAC, even when it became evident, on July 13, 2018, when Mr Maguire appeared as an ICAC witness, that he had sought commissions from property developers.

Eight days prior to that hearing, Mr Maguire and Ms Berejiklian held a 52-minute intercepted phone call in which he told her of his impending appearance; he told her it related to an introduction he had provided to Canterbury City Councillor Michael Hawatt and representatives of the Chinese property development company, Country Garden.

 

Mr Maguire said he had “never accepted a dollar” and “never done a deal”; Ms Berejiklian cautioned him not to associate with “dodgy” people, a remark later put to her during the hearing as a possible suspicion of corrupt conduct.

“Why didn’t you just report to the commission the information he gave you during the conversation on the 5th of July, in the course of which … you told him not to engage with these dodgy people?” Ms McColl asked.

“Because he told me he’d done nothing wrong,” Ms Berejiklian said.

“But you’d just found out on the 13th of July that there may well be some problem with believing that assertion (his professed innocence) in the light of the evidence?” “Because clearly this body had all that knowledge and information,” Ms Berejiklian replied.

“You didn’t know the extent of the information this body had,” Ms McColl said. “For all you knew the information he’d imparted to you on the 5th of July was something which could have assisted the commission with its inquiry.”

Ms Berejiklian added it would have been difficult for her to recall the July 5 conversation due to the time that elapsed. Ms McColl said the conversation had only occurred a week earlier and that it “went for 52 minutes”.

Section 11 of the ICAC Act requires public officials to refer matters where there is a “reasonable suspicion” of corrupt conduct, an obligation that has formed a central line of inquiry into Ms Berejiklian’s conduct, among others, during the two weeks of hearings.

Other wrinkles identified by the ICAC with Ms Berejiklian’s account were put to her during Monday’s hearing, including that she had been aware of a $1.5m commission Mr Maguire was anticipating to receive from a property deal at Badgerys Creek, on Sydney’s outskirts. Ms Berejiklian told the commission she had not taken that claim seriously.

She was also forced to explain how it was possible she had been both frank and honest with her former chief-of-staff, Sarah Cruickshank, when their accounts of a 2018 telephone conversation, in which the relationship with Mr Maguire featured heavily, were so markedly different.

Ms Cruickshank told the hearings Ms Berejiklian called her on the day Mr Maguire appeared at the ICAC to inform her that she had been in a “historic” relationship with the then-Liberal MP.

Ms Cruickshank said Ms Berejiklian was “categorically clear” the relationship ended prior to her becoming premier; Ms Berejiklian said her memory of the conversation was unclear.

Later, under cross-examination, Ms Cruickshank’s barrister, Hugh White, put it to Ms Berejiklian directly whether she was being dishonest about her recollection of the conversation, and that she had, in fact, lied to Ms Cruickshank.

“I’ve been honest in what I thought I remember, in what I do remember, and I appreciate that she has a different recollection,” Ms Berejiklian said.

Earlier in the hearing the former premier also described as “absurd” the possibility she could have diverted $170m on the request of Mr Maguire, as the ICAC heard on Friday. The commission has since heard the money had already been allocated in the budget.

Ms Berejiklian said it was likely she asked for the funding to be presented as a line item in the budget, so the community could see it.