Wayne Swan:
..what you can see is that Mr Grant didn’t receive any assistance from OzCar or Ford Credit, what Mr Grant did, through a Member of Parliament, was to contact me, through Mr Bernie Ripoll and then I put him in contact with a departmental lesion officer..

Laurie Oakes:
Well, you say that Mr Grant didn’t get special treatment, but on the same day that - that a Treasury official made representations on his behalf to Ford Credit, they are also discussing with Ford Credit that company’s application for a $500 million line of credit. Now, that’s enormous pressure, isn’t it?

… what we know about this is that Greg Cohen the Managing Director of Ford Credit says that Treasury made it clear to him that Mr Grant was an associate of the Prime Minister, so they go into this meeting having been told that Mr Grant’s a mate of the Prime Minister, they’re after a half a million loan from the government and Treasury said oh, by the way, this bloke needs a bit of help. That’s enormous pressure, what are they going to say, no?

WS:
Laurie, Mr Grant didn’t receive any assistance from Ford Credit. You have to go back…

LO:
Wasn’t it offered?

WS:
I don’t know, Laurie,

LO:
The email showed that you were being kept informed of the progress of Mr Grant’s application, they were even sending copies of the emails to your home fax, now, how many other applications, like that, were you informed of in such detail.

.. DIVERSION ..

Laurie Oakes:
Let me ask you this, the Prime Minister’s called in the Auditor General to invesigate whether he or his office made representations on Mr Grant’s behalf, but I noticed the terms of reference of the Auditor General inquiry don’t mention you, would you be prepared to ask the Prime Minister to extend that inquiry so the Auditor General looked at the propriety of your conduct and the conduct of your office in this?

WS: Well, I’m sure that the Auditor General will be looking at the email traffic between the Treasury and, between the Treasury and others…

LO: But in the terms of reference, specifically refer to the Prime Minister and his office, they quite obviously leave you out. Will you ask the Prime Minister to extend the terms of reference to cover you and your office?

WS: What I would be happy for the Auditor General, or anyone else, to do, is to look at all of the emails which demonstrate that Mr Grant - Mr Grant was not treated any differently from any other.

LO: In that case, why not ask for the terms of reference to be extended so that can happen?

WS: Well, I’m not sure that your characterisation of the terms of reference is as you say.

LO: Well I can ?? what the Prime Minister told us on Friday night?

(The Treasury official, Mr Grech told the Senate Committee he thinks he was originally approached about Mr. Grant’s situation by someone in the PM’s office. Now, did Mr Grech imagine that?)

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