I’m still working for Eddie: Obeid nephew

THE businessman running a company for Queensland’s top public servant has admitted to still working for disgraced former NSW Labor MP Eddie Obeid.

THE businessman running a company for Queensland’s top public servant has admitted to still working for disgraced former NSW Labor MP Eddie Obeid.

Mr Obeid’s nephew, Dennis Jabour, is the only director and co-owner of a company with Jon Grayson, Campbell Newman’s hand-picked director-general of the Department of Premier and Cabinet.

Mr Grayson this week defended his involvement in the company, saying he had only a “passive interest” in Gasfields Water and Waste Services and played no role in its management.

Instead, Gasfields is run by Mr Jabour, who admitted to the NSW Independent Commission against Corruption on Thursday that he still worked for the Obeid family.

“I’d been asked to do something for them in the last month,” he said of the family business.

The Queensland Premier, Mr Newman, this week defended Mr Grayson’s extensive business interests, saying the $670,000-a-year public service boss had declared his shareholdings in several resource-related companies on the pecuniary interest register.

But the Premier’s office has refused to publicly release Mr Grayson’s declaration. Mr Grayson has also refused to be interviewed about his holdings. During questioning on Thursday, Mr Jabour initially could not even name Gasfields Water and Waste Services, set up to offer water treatments for the resource sector.

The company was incorporated last May, with equal shareholdings held by Mr Grayson, Mr Jabour, Queensland energy executive Tony Bellas, Wayne Myers, then Australian Water Holdings boss Nick Di Girolamo and Eddie Obeid Jr.

Mr Obeid and Mr Di Girolamo transferred their shares to Mr Jabour in August.

At the hearing, Mr Jabour said Mr Obeid had been “mistakenly” included in company documents as one of the six shareholders.

Mr Jabour, who described himself as a “property person” at the ICAC hearings, said he went to work at Australian Water Holdings in 2010 after telling Mr Obeid Jr that he needed “certainty of income”.

He was later offered a job as “land development manager” with AWH — now at the centre of the ICAC hearings — on a salary of $150,000.

But he admitted that he never actually did any work in the specific role.