The Independent Commission Against Corruption heard yesterday that the planned mine training school at Doyles Creek was thought by departmental staff to be a pretext for the minister “gifting” the exploration to interests associated with union ally John Maitland.
In a briefing note dated February 22, 2007, Macdonald’s department advised there would be “major policy difficulties [and] potential probity issues” in granting the licence without a tender.
NuCoal said in a letter to shareholders that it had sought and been granted leave to be represented before the ICAC.
“Senior counsel will participate in the hearings as necessary in the interests of the company and its shareholders,” it said.
“The board and the lawyers retained to act for NuCoal are considering this opening address very carefully. The company intends to engage in responding to and assisting the ICAC to fully understand the facts and circumstances surrounding the grant of EL 7270 in the interests of the company.”
Former deputy director-general in the NSW Department of Primary Industries, Alan Coutts, told ICAC there was no “proper reason” for the minister to award a $100 million coal exploration licence without tender. He only realised that the licence had been awarded after a local newspaper started asking questions.
“I subsequently found out that the minister’s office had got a template of the letter from our Maitland office and used that to draft a letter from the minister’s office,” Coutts said.
“I was ... very, very surprised when this happened and in my experience I have never seen it happen before, and the expectation would be that any such letter would be done from the department.”
The inquiry heard the Mine Safety Advisory Council had advised against a training mine as early as 2000 and it was regarded with suspicion afterwards because of the difficulty in training for different coal mining situations.
The director-general of the Department of Primary Industries from 2004 until January 2008, Barry Buffier, said he regarded the idea of a training mine as “not much more than a thought bubble from John Maitland”
“I thought that we had been successful in terms of our briefing note in putting the issue to bed or bursting the thought bubble and assumed that that was the end of it,” he said.
In its interim profit announcement, NuCoal said significant work was undertaken from October to December last year to construct Stage 1 of the training facility at Doyles Creek.
The development application for Stage 2, a simulated underground mine training facility, is awaiting approval by Singleton Council, it said.
The Occupation Certificate for the Stage 1 Training Facility was received in early March, and the first training course, Basic Electrical Training (BET), was delivered on March 12 by Techserve Training and Development.
