Holy moly, I step away from Warrnambool for three weeks and return to find the place is on fire, with whistleblowers dropping an A-bomb right onto the Warrnambool City Council.
A string of red-hot allegations has been sent to Ratepayers Victoria after its president, Dean Hurlston, urged council staff to “whistle loudly” if they knew anything about the misuse of public money following the WCC credit card scandal.
Mr Hurlston has listed the allegations in a letter sent yesterday to WCC Mayor Tony Herbert and CEO Peter Schneider, and paints a damning picture of what was allegedly going on behind closed doors.
The allegations include cover-ups, mismanagement, fraudulent behaviour and a lack of action in response to staff concerns that stretched to the very top.
We even, allegedly, paid for private parties dressed up as “events”.
Here is the list:
Attempts over time to raise significant concerns of fraudulent spending and cover up of same;
Systematic abuse of internal controls of authorisation of spending by management;
Coercion and direction by senior management to subvert said controls and “help hide” spending;
Direction to suppliers to “alter” the contents of invoices to hide the true nature of expenditure;
The use of WCC resources for personal or family benefit;
The use of WCC assets for personal gain;
Inadequate reporting of expenditure (thousands of dollars’ worth of transactions reported as “supplies”);
“Parties” and “events” openly abusing the use of council funds (ratepayers’ monies); and
WCC not investigating or attempting to recover falsely procured items.
You might want to read that list twice, as I did, to digest it.
It sums up all of the issues that have been swirling around the WCC “credit card scandal” which, as I have said so many times, is just the tip of the iceberg.
Mr Hurlston has urged the whistleblowers to contact IBAC and the Local Government Inspectorate immediately and seek confidential and protected disclosure. (I am going to add to that and say they should also contact the Victorian Ombudsman straight away, where an inquiry is already underway. The number is 9613 6222.)
He has also urged the council to appoint an external investigator so all staff with any information about misconduct are able to speak freely and openly.
To be clear, at this stage these are allegations only, but the fact the whistleblowers have gone to RV in the first place speaks volumes.
Whistleblowers take an enormous risk and nobody throws themselves into that line of fire without weighing up the potential cost of being exposed and punished.
It comes as no surprise to me that RV says in its letter that some staff claim they have been intimidated and bullied “for trying to expose the truth”.
Yep, I know all about those tactics, and I can only imagine how dis-spiriting and terrifying it must be for those who depend on the council for their livelihood.
The WCC is still doing all it can to shut people up, including me, but it won’t work.
Why?
Because too many people want the truth.
You want the truth. The whistleblowers want the truth. Ratepayers Victoria want the truth. I want the truth.
So the council may continue to spend hours of energy trying to shut this all down, to limit the damage, to flush out the leakers, and to punish or discredit those who speak up, but it won’t work.
And our sole newspaper may prefer to write stories about desperate people stealing twiggy sticks or passion pop, but uncovering corporate crime and mismanagement is a slow, complicated and often boring process. Twiggy sticks get more clicks.
Yet the truth always rises to the top.
I call it a slow burn.
Even when a bombshell drops like today, it can take months or even years to peg out all the facts, but it will happen and it will be well worth it because that, dear terriers, is what accountability is all about.
It’s good to be back.
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Shock vote sees WCC vote for in-depth investigation
Carol Altmann – The Terrier
JUST IN: This is a shock – the W’bool City Council has voted 4/3 tonight to ask the Local Government Minister to look at ALL aspects of the council’s financial performance and governance for the seven years up to 31.12.2018.
Cr Peter Hulin’s motion was supported by Mayor Tony Herbert, Cr Sue Cassidy, and Cr Robert Anderson.
Such a review, if the Minister agrees to it, would be at no cost to council.
Wow. This a true win for people power. An absolute win.
Meanwhile, Cr Kylie Gaston – who voted against this move – was ropable that The Terrier was exposing all sorts of things and made sure that we knew it. My hair was on fire by the end of that blast!
In particular, my reporting on the business links between the council’s economic development manager Shaun Miller and private businessman Ravin Merchandani really grated Cr Gaston’s wick. Why?
I must be on to something, so you know what that means, don’t you? On. We. Go.
WCC credit card #4 and laying the whole mess bare
The truth laid bare: unravelling Warrnambool City Council’s spending and connections means entering a tangled, seemingly endless web.
Carol Altmann – The Terrier
Today is the final episode of Season One of House of Cards meets Warrnambool City Council meets Game of Thrones, where all the lines in the ever-thickening and outrageous plot come together and I lay it all out on the table.
The opening scene in this special, double episode is yet another corporate credit card – we are now up to number four – which has the same pattern of spending on the backs of ratepayers that has become so depressingly familiar: the dinners, the drinks, the endless coffees, the lunches, on and on and on.
I have been sitting on all of this information for a very, very long time, hoping the council would eventually throw open the windows, but it hasn’t and it won’t, so I am doing it for them.
I will start with credit card #4 and a snapshot:
Exhibit A is $98 worth of drinks at the Hairy Goat on a Friday night on 21 September last year, which is around the time when, supposedly, the council was cracking down on its credit card use after “discovering” the inappropriate and over-the-top spending of former tourism chief David McMahon.
Exhibit B is a $163 dinner for two people at the Warrnambool Hotel on a Saturday night, 26 May last year, which included a dozen oysters au naturale and, wait for it, a plate of eye fillet. (Whoever gets to play the eye fillet in the eventual movie of this saga is going to become a star).
And then there is Exhibit C, a receipt from 10 December last year – after the council re-wrote its floppy credit card policy – where two people spent $105.30 on dinner at the Japanese cafe Gyoza Gyoza in Melbourne, of which $44.90 was soaked up by a bottle of pinot gris (with two glasses).
This outing was enjoyed just a week after the council decided to apply to break the rate cap and bump our rates up by 4.5% this year and the next.
What a ****** cheek.
Like you, I have had a gut full of the excuses and the ducking and weaving and hiding behind Utopia inspired spin that does nothing to comfort ratepayers that this long age of entitlement, slack governance and lack of accountability is well and truly over.
It needs to be rooted out and that’s why it’s time to name names.
Credit card #4 is held by the Manager of Economic Development and Investment Shaun Miller, he of the two jobs and who, after being named in relation to those two jobs, prompted an email from CEO Peter Schneider asking me not to name staff.
I tried that tack, but the council has done nothing since to convince me that it intends to get to the bottom of the rot which runs so deep. (#notAllstaff)
In fact all the signs point to yet another cover-up, so the gloves are coming off, because my only motivation through all of this is to expose the truth. So here are some truths.
The accommodation invoice from the WCC delegation to the 2017 Victorian Tourism Conference at Flemington Racecourse.
Mr Miller travels around a lot. I can now reveal he is the mystery man who, you may recall and according to an invoice paid for by his former colleague, Mr McMahon, arrived two days early, on a Saturday, for a conference in 2017 that was held at the Flemington Racecourse which, on that Saturday, was hosting a major racing event.
A coincidence? Maybe, because our council thrives on coincidence.
Certain people don’t like me naming Mr Miller. When I wrote about his two jobs, there was a barrage of abuse and behind-the-scenes threats, perhaps because these people suspected that I knew more than I was writing about publicly. They were right, I did. More about that shortly.
I have not had any direct response from Mr Miller about his credit card use, however I did get another polite email on his behalf from Mr Schneider last Friday night, but it said nothing new and provided no explanation for the receipts above.
Mr Miller’s spending is signed off by his superior, Director City Growth Andrew Paton.
This is the card that was used, among many other things, to pay for the $1476 dinner at Pippies, and the $700 dinner at the Myrtle Kitchen which included five bottles of wine at $79 a bottle.
Mr Paton was very polite in his response to my emailed questions last week, but he is gagged from answering me directly, such is the council’s tight grip around the throats of those who might wish to talk to journalists.
If he could have spoken to me, Mr Paton might have explained the purpose of the boozy Myrtle Dinner which was attended by four people, including himself and Cr Sue Cassidy.
Cr Cassidy is another name that is significant to this story because Cr Cassidy is one of two councillors on the council’s Audit and Risk Committee. This committee is important because, well, it is designed to keep an eye on audit and risk, ie. the use of public money.
So let’s paint the picture: Mr Paton is the boss of Mr Miller and was the boss of Mr McMahon and was the manager responsible for signing off on all the questionable spending on their credit cards, while at the same time using his own credit card to pay for a long, boozy dinner attended by Cr Cassidy who is a member of the council Audit and Risk Committee that will now oversee the investigation into those cards.
The House of Cards ain’t got nothing on this.
And rolling along behind the scene of this car wreck are three specific side stories that I also want you to know about.
(Intermission. Lights up. Toilet break. Grab a choc top. Right, away we go…)
An example of the redacted credit card statements provided by the WCC via a lengthy and costly Freedom of Information process.
Side story one: Freedom of Information. As you know, none of this – none of it – would have seen the light of day had it not been for a Freedom of Information application that I lodged almost a year ago, asking for Mr McMahon’s credit card receipts.
The council did everything it could to stop me getting that information fully and efficiently and the whole process took nine months and a lot of money (#thankyouTerrierTipJar).
Even after the nine-month wait and all that money, we would not have known about the secret repayments and behind-the-scenes deal between Mr McMahon and the then CEO Bruce Anson last November, had it not been for sources.
And who in the council was in charge of responding to my Freedom of Information applications about the credit cards?
The CEO’s executive assistant, Wendy Clark.
So, to try and find out information that ultimately involved the actions and decisions of the former CEO, I had to go through the former CEO’s executive assistant.
And if I wanted to dive deeper and detail the tens of thousands of dollars of credit card spending on behalf of Mr Anson – he didn’t use his own corporate card to buy, for example, the cases of wine enjoyed after council meetings – I would need to go through the same executive assistant.
Does that pass the pub test?
And just to tangle that web a little more, Ms Clark, the CEO executive assistant, is the senior staff member who has lived in a council-owned CBD apartment for more than 30 years and for most of that time has leased it on nothing more than a handshake deal.
That suspect arrangement existed until I started asking questions and learned, wait for it, a written lease had been miraculously signed just a few weeks before my probing.
This is the rotten culture I am talking about.
It stinks and it has to end.
Side story two: former tourism chief Mr McMahon was a bully and made life hell for a lot of people, especially women. He came to the council with a reputation as a bully that somehow escaped the attention of those who hired him, but which I have since substantiated.
This is how this whole story started, not from people contacting me to talk about his credit card abuse – although that was raised too – but because of Mr McMahon’s foul-mouthed bullying and a desperation to be heard, because nobody in council was listening.
I told Cr Tony Herbert about this bullying when we met last August in the meeting that he now fails to remember much about at all. Cr Herbert did nothing. The council did nothing. #goodbloke #heLikesAdrink
Nothing happened to Mr McMahon – he stayed in his top job while so many around him fell away, distressed and exhausted, and he stayed there right up until his dishonesty around his credit card expenditure finally caught up with him last July.
How was Mr McMahon hired in the first place? Why was he allowed to get away with all that he did? And why on earth – why on earth – did current CEO Mr Schneider praise him upon his departure?
This is how the council boys’ club works and it is part of the rotten culture that I am talking about.
It stinks and it has to end.
Mayor Tony Herbert signs an MOU with the Mayor of Mariestad Johan Abrahamsson after a delegation from Mariestad and Nilsson Energy visited Warrnambool last April. Image: WCC
Side story three: Mr Miller has two jobs. One is full-time with the council and the other, as I reported recently, is with a start-up called Acusensus, which Mr Miller joined in March this year as International Business Development Manager and for whom he works 7.6 hours a week.
The chairman of Acusensus is a smart, charismatic guy called Ravin Mirchandani.
Before Mr Miller joined the WCC in 2016, he and Mr Mirchandani were in upper level management at a company called Mack Valves, which makes valves for things like hydrogen pumps.
Mr Mirchandani is still the director/chairman of Mack Valves and is now also the Australian representative of a group called Nilsson Energy, based near the regional city of Mariestad, Sweden.
Mr Mirchandani became the Australian rep of Nilsson Energy after going to see its work in Mariestad in June last year and, it seems, came away very impressed.
Ten months later, in April 2019, Mr Mirchandani was part of a delegation from the city of Mariestad and Nilsson Energy that was invited to visit Warrnambool and talk about using hydrogen electricity, which is the next big thing and has companies jostling for a slice of the action.
As a result of that April trip, Warrnambool CC and the city of Mariestad signed an MOU to share ideas and information and keep the momentum moving.
Tomorrow night’s council meeting (2/9) will decide whether to send our Mayor, CEO and a council staff member – I wonder who that might be? – to Sweden to visit Mariestad before the end of the year. The public will help pay for the cost of that trip.
And this is the nub: nowhere, at no time, has there been a public declaration by the council of Mr Miller’s active business links to Mr Mirchandani and any potential conflict of interest that may arise from the Mack Valves/Nilsson Energy Australia/Acusensus connection.
In fact Mr Mirchandani’s name is missing from the list of names in tomorrow night’s council agenda of those who visited Warrnambool with the Mariestad delegation in April.
Zero transparency.
This is the rotten culture that I am talking about.
It stinks and, despite hundreds of hours of investigation into all of the issues above, I am still only just touching the surface.
Curtain falls. Lights up. Credits roll.
Credits: all of the brave people who have trusted me to tell the truth, I see you and I want to thank you. And Dad, as I write this on this Father’s Day, I see you too, even though you are long dead. My Dad was a bricklayer who got up at 5am every morning to make the money to pay his rates. I have done the best I can to get the fresh start in Warrnambool that we all deserve; it is now up to our elected officials, and our leaders, to press the reset button. On we go.
WCC credit cards: bringing in Barry, the Boolshite detector
Carol Altmann – The Terrier
Isn’t it astonishing that our elected councillors, while pushing for a rate hike, knew nothing about the thousands of dollars being racked up on Warrnambool City Council corporate credit cards for meals, alcohol, travel, accommodation and coffees?
They apparently had no idea. None.
I don’t think our councillors even knew that the council has 81 corporate credit cards floating around – one for every four, full-time equivalent staffers.
And worse, when it was discovered that at least one of these cards was being used to buy excessive amounts of booze, and car washes, and unauthorised dinners, they didn’t know about that either.
No idea. None. Nobody told them.
(I am still waiting for a formal statement on behalf of all councillors from Mayor Tony Herbert on the simple question of who was told what and when. Hopefully I can run it in full tomorrow.)
Despite pushing for a rate hike, it appears no councillors knew about the council’s credit card spending.
We now know that more than one card was being used in this way, thanks to my asking questions, sources who have a strong moral compass, and documents released through Freedom of Information that I lodged on 30 October last year.
And yet the very councillors who agreed to jack up our rates by 4.5% for the next two years didn’t know a thing about it, and nobody bothered to ask.
Even the Audit and Risk Committee, which includes Cr Sue Cassidy and Cr Michael Neoh, didn’t know.
According to a statement from Crs Neoh and Cassidy, the committee only gets notified if there is suspicion of fraud. Well, guess what…..
If this is what passes for scrutiny of ratepayers’ money at a time when every dollar counts, we are being ripped off and no wonder – no wonder – the big party going on behind the scenes in some quarters of council went unreported for so long.
Which brings me to a new feature in The Terrier – the Big Barry Boolshite detector.
Big Barry is a Bull Terrier and he can sniff out Boolshite at 100 paces, so tonight I am unleashing him for the first time and I am sure it will not be the last.
I gave Big Barry a sniff of the council’s claim that it, miraculously, discovered Mr McMahon’s over-the-top credit card spending in September, just a few weeks before I lodged my FOI on 30 October.
Big Barry’s meter went into the red zone! Bool-shite detected!
Because I have since sifted through my emails to council, and I discovered that I first asked about their credit cards on, wait for it, 20 September last year!
Why did I ask them? Because journalists in South Australia and Tasmania were exposing credit card rorts within councils.
Such was the flurry of excitement within council about my questions, it put a whole response on its website, buried where nobody would find it, a week later on 27 September last year.
And then on 30 October I lodged my FOI on Mr McMahon’s spending, having received a tip off about a big booze up that went onto the corporate card and was paid for by you, me and Barry via his exorbitant dog rego fee.
And coincidentally, a few days later in early November, former CEO Bruce Anson sits down with Mr McMahon and sorts out how much Mr McMahon needs to repay.
(Barry, Barry, calm down…it’s okay, we all know its Boolshite).
Despite being there, at Cape Schanck, Crs Herbert and Owen apparently saw nothing untoward that made them think, “hang on, who is paying for all this?”
And this is why we have lost faith and heart and trust in the very systems and people that should be protecting us from being exploited.
The new CEO Peter Schneider is holding his internal review, all of the 81 credit cards are now being checked – at long last – but, sorry, for those of us now paying higher rates and fees, it is all too little, too late.
Our local MP Roma Britnell is the only one in authority who, so far, has had the spine to take this straight to the top. Straight to the Local Government Minister, Adem Somyurek, who has been swift to act on the rubbish going on down in Gippsland at South Gippsland Shire.
I agree with Roma’s call for a full independent inquiry and so does Barry and I bet you do too.
Thankyou so very much to everyone who has supported The Terrier with a contribution to the Tip Jar:this investigation is the Tip Jar at work. You can be part of it by clicking below.
On the gravy train, there are always plenty of passengers
Carol Altmann – The Terrier
Here we go again.
One of the big questions that hangs over the whole Warrnambool City Council credit card scandal is how many other cards were being used to eat, drink, and stay awake with endless coffees?
Tonight I can tell you that it does not stop with former tourism manager David McMahon.
In fact, my left rib tells me that we are just getting started.
This is because the council’s secret credit card policy was so slack it allowed some council staff to spend up big on alcohol, food and their almost daily coffee run to Fishtales without fear of retribution.
And that is why we have a receipt like the one above.
It shows that in August last year, another WCC senior staff member attended a conference on the Mornington Peninsula and racked up $368 worth of drinks over two days.
This equals 40% of the total bill.
Toot, toot, all aboard! When there is a gravy train on the move, it is never short of passengers.
Toot! Toot! All aboard the gravy train. This is my adapted version of an original cartoon by Steve Nease (neasecartoons.com) originally published in The Cagle Post, Canada.
The person who racked up this receipt in August was, I believe, at the Cape Schanck conference held in July where more than $1600 was spent on Mr McMahon’s credit card on food and drinks.
This person was also part of a five-day trip to WA with Mr McMahon in October, where the infamous “tackle” was bought after 7pm on a Friday night.
And all of this travelling and boozing was going on behind the scenes while the council prepared its case to raise rates above the cap.
It is like the days of Versailles, with a select group of council insiders enjoying the party, while the majority of people in Warrnambool work their backsides off to make ends meet and are being belted with rate rises, fee rises and fine rises, because the council is going broke.
The credit card spending is just one part of the enormous waste that has gone on for a decade, but it is perhaps the most disgraceful, because it can’t be explained away as a mistake, or a misunderstanding, or from “circumstances beyond our control”.
It is pure greed, aided and abetted by a system that let us down.
Those council staff – and thankfully they are in the minority – who carved into eye fillet steaks, or who ordered another bottle of red, or another round of beers, or another glass of white wine, or a $4 coffee on their $120,000 salary – knew exactly what they were doing and they were allowed to do it, until last October when the shit hit the fan as a result of my FOI application that would eventually expose the whole rort.
It’s not quite up there with the largesse of Louis XIV, but the WCC credit card scandal is exposing a culture of reckless spending and waste that stretches back years.
It doesn’t matter if the money has since been repaid and I don’t know, in this particular case, if it has. (Once again, the council is not answering questions.)
And it doesn’t matter how the council now tries to spin it: it was just one rogue manager, discovered – miraculously – just a month before my FOI, all repaid, all tidied up, a mere blimp, just a “social media” storm…
None of that is true.
What matters it that we are exposing a culture that led us to the financial mess we are in today and for which we are paying dearly.
And all of those behind the rot have to be held accountable, wherever they may be today, including those who have since left Versailles and are now living in Coquenball mansion.
I am waiting to see what happens next with the council’s reporting to the authorities, its investigations and its reviews.
In the meantime, we press on with our own investigations and reporting and reviews.
Thanks to your contributions to the Tip Jar, I today lodged two more FOIs on credit card usage with the council.
The answers may take a long time to come, but it is worth the wait.
Thankyou so very much to those who have supported The Terrier with a contribution to the Tip Jar:this investigation is the Tip Jar at work. You can be part of it by clicking below.
