Chandler letter blasts former minister Petinos

Building Commissioner David Chandler’s resignation letter, tabled in Parliament today, reveals growing concerns about former Fair Trading minister Eleni Petinos and her dealings with the property development group that hired former deputy premier John Barilaro.

The confidential letter to department secretary Emma Hogan, released under parliamentary order on Thursday, outlined a number of serious concerns, not least the building commissioner’s “problematic” relationship with Petinos’ office which, he writes, influenced his decision to resign.

According to a story on the Sydney Morning Herald website, in the letter – which Ms Hogan passed to the Independent Commission Against Corruption – Mr Chandler described “concerns that I have with the advised relationship of the Minister and Coronation Property Group.”

“As advised to you I received a call from the minister’s office shortly after a draft order was issued on Coronation’s Merrylands development,” the letter said. This development, a major project of Coronation Property’s, had been the subject of a draft stop-work order (now lifted) issued by Mr Chandler.

“Shortly after that call, a message was sent to me by John Barilaro who I was advised had recently joined the Coronation Board. This contact came to me as a message on my personal phone requesting a meeting with me,” the letter continues.

The letter goes on to detail how Mr Chandler met with Mr Barilaro and sent details of the meeting to Ms Hogan, the senior civil servant in the department.

The building commissioner also described long-term deteriorating relations with the minister’s office, after a ministerial reshuffle last year saw Ms Petinos take the portfolio from Minister Kevin Anderson.

“Alas, the same level of engagement has not been experienced since. My personal experience has been one where engagement with the minister’s office has been problematic,” he wrote, adding that other officers in the department had reported similar issues and that important pieces of legislation had “run into serious disruption”.

A first-time minister in the reshuffle that followed Gladys Berijiklian’s resignation, Ms Petinos was also handed responsibility for small business, an area that was her prime focus, as she made clear in her comments following her sacking.

And there were concerns when she initiated a departmental inquiry into flimsy allegations that Mr Chandler had misled parliament when he told a committee that he didn’t recommend certifiers but was taped telling builders that he warned banks against dealing with the worst of them. The investigation went nowhere.

Meanwhile, Ms Petinos’ former ministry is in chaos, with one commissioner having already left and another on the way out while she herself was sacked by the Premier following allegations (which she denies) of bullying and concerns about high staff turnover.

Building Commissioner Chandler, seen by many as a hero in his efforts to clean up the NSW apartment building industry, announced last week that he will leave the job in November, only three months into a recently signed one-year contract extension.

Mr Barilaro, meanwhile, is currently the focus of a separate parliamentary inquiry into how he came to be offered a plum overseas posting as the state’s trade envoy to New York.

That controvery has also claimed the political scalp of another former Fair Trading Minster, Stuart Ayres, who was more recently deputy leader of the Liberal Party and Minister for Sport and Western Sydney.  

Premier Perrottet told parliament this week that Mr Chandler’s resignation was not a factor in his decision to sack Petinos as minister, but added that he had not read the letter in question.

Opposition fair trading spokeswoman Courtney Houssos said the government needed to provide more clarity over Mr Chandler’s departure.

“I’m really concerned that the premier has not taken the time to read this letter after we’ve been asking about it for several weeks,” she said. “It’s either extreme negligence, or maybe there is something in there that he doesn’t want to know.”

Ms Petinos said she met with Coronation representatives on June 2, although Mr Barilaro was not there.

“We met in relation to building regulatory matters and I did not take any action in relation to the matters,” she said, adding that it was the building commissioner and not the minister who imposed and lifted stop-work orders.

A second meeting with Coronation was disclosed in her diary out of “an abundance of caution”, Ms Petinos explained, adding that the June 21 meeting was social in nature.

Mr Barilaro said that meeting was a social engagement to celebrate his new appointment as the trade commissioner to New York.

“I was no longer an employee of Coronation. I did not meet with the minister during my time with Coronation,” Barilaro said in a statement to the SMH.

The Byzantine connections that entangle three former Fair Trading ministers and the former deputy premier in a multitude of embarrassments are detailed here.

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