FORMER union boss and retired cabinet minister Martin Ferguson is offering to tell the national royal commission into union corruption his knowledge of controversial payments, key witnesses and other information in the AWU slush fund scandal that has dogged the Labor Party and Julia Gillard.
Mr Ferguson told The Australian that, if asked under oath, he would provide information including details revealed to him recently by a former Melbourne builder, Kon Spyridis, payments to whom have been part of an ongoing investigation by Victoria Police’s Fraud Squad into hundreds of thousands of dollars that flowed in and out of the slush fund.
The money was corruptly solicited from companies as part of an organised scam and some of it was spent, at the direction of a union boss, on renovations at Ms Gillard’s house, according to former AWU official Ralph Blewitt, who has admitted to police his own role in a fraud.