Icac hears of friendship breakdown between Reformers members – as it happened

Returning to the Icac’s Operation Rosny, the inquiry has heard this afternoon about how relationships between some members of the conservative right factional Liberal group the Reformers began to break down.

That includes the friendship between today’s witness, Robert Assaf, and Christian Ellis, who yesterday we heard had founded the Reformers together in 2017 after forming a strong bond while working on the No campaign for the same-sex marriage plebiscite.

Assaf said he later came to distrust Ellis, including in relation to the payment of finder’s fees to him for finding Ellis new clients.

Ellis ran Beckington, a registered lobbyist set up by the group, which allegedly took on funds under the guise of consulting services to support branch-stacking efforts, including from schools governing body Catholic Schools NSW, Beckington’s first client in 2019.

The inquiry heard that in 2021 Catholic Schools NSW CEO, Dallas McInerney, allegedly wanted to end the relationship with Beckington. Assaf said he gave the following advice to McInerney on multiple occasions in an attempt to keep payments flowing to a different company, run by Reformer Jeremy Greenwood.

He told the inquiry the advice “would have been something like”:

double quotation markChristian’s a liar. He’s greedy. I don’t trust him, and I’m not sure he’s doing much for you at the moment. Jeremy seems to be picking up most of the slack. Jeremy’s starting his own company up, you may want to consider going to Jeremy.