Key Daniel Andrews agent Jean Dong met China influencer

Daniel Andrews’s senior China trade official held key meetings with Beijing influ­e­ncer Jean Dong.

Jean Dong.

Daniel Andrews’s senior China trade official held key meetings with Beijing influ­e­ncer Jean Dong after she created a Belt and Road Initiative company and started lobbying the Premier to sign up to the global investment scheme.

The Australian can reveal that Ms Dong, 32, has worked closely with senior bureaucrat Jason Fitts, the Premier’s “regional specialist” for China within the government’s international trade unit.

Mr Fitts was also in charge of managing two taxpayer-funded contracts totalling $38,650 that the government granted to Ms Dong without tender in 2017-18 and 2019-20.

The government has admitted that because of an “admin­istrative error”, the first contract had not been disclosed, in breach-of-disclosure rules.

“Mr Fitts is the regional specialist for China working within the Global Victoria team,” a spokesman for the Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions said

“The role of regional specialists is to engage with stakeholders to implement Victorian government policy. This has involved standard meetings with Ms Dong and management of two contracts­, both of which were approved­ at a higher level.”

The government refused to detail how many meetings Ms Dong and Mr Fitts held, and what the agenda items were.

The government has also refuse­d to reveal who at the “higher levels” approved the $38,650 Dong deals.

Ms Dong declined to respond to a series of detailed questions from The Australian about her meetings with Mr Fitts and her two government contracts.

Ms Dong, a self-proclaimed pro-China influencer, and Mr Fitts can be placed together at a public event staged by the Aust­ralia China Business Council on May 1, 2018.

According to a tweet from the ACBC, there was an “insightful panel discussion at ACBC Victoria’s Belt & Road event with Jean Dong, Australia China BRI; Jason Fitts, Trade Vic …”

This event was almost six months before the Andrews ­government signed up to the China deal.

The Chinese-born lobbyist’s ties to Mr Fitts represent yet another link between the former pageant queen and the Andrews government.

Just 18 months after Ms Dong created her Melbourne-based ACBRI company in November 2015, she was awarded the first of her government contracts and about this time also hosted Mr Andrews at the Belt and Road event.

At this event, the Premier lauded a “new energy” in relations between Victoria and China.

Ms Dong also says she met Mr Andrews once at a trade event in China.

Victoria’s China-based trade commissioner also paid $12,500 in taxpayer funds to join a trade delegation hosted by Ms Dong in China.