NSW treasurer Mike Baird reveals inquiry into employment contracts at Macquarie Generation
The New South Wales treasurer, Mike Baird, has revealed a formal inquiry into apparently inflated contract payments for senior executives of Macquarie Generation which were uncovered as the state government seeks to sell the $1bn power company.
Baird announced that the board of Macquarie Generation – which supplies around a quarter of the state’s power – had “opened an inquiry into potential breaches of internal approval practices and government policy, particularly in regard to changes made to employee contracts”.
Its chief executive, Russell Skelton, and human resources manager, Sharon Howes, had stood aside from their regular duties while retired high court justice John Dyson Heydon AC QC conducts the inquiry, he said.
Guardian Australia understands that information supplied to the government and the bidders during the privatisation process revealed new clauses had been written into the contracts of some senior management in June giving them higher payments as a result of the sale – either as transfer payments if they continued with the new owners or redundancy payments if they did not.
The payments were “not consistent with other asset transactions”, a source said.
Guardian Australia is not suggesting that Skelton and Howes received the benefit of any alleged new clauses in their employment contracts.
Bidders for Macquarie are understood to include AGL Energy and China’s Shenhua group and the NSW government had advised it wanted to see first-round bids in October and final offers in January for the sale. It intends to use the proceeds for big NSW infrastructure projects.
Baird said the inquiry would be “a thorough and independent examination of all relevant issues” but would not delay the timetable for the sale.