Page 398 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 2 March 1994
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MR DE DOMENICO: I have a supplementary question, Madam Speaker. I thank the Minister for answering the question that it was ACTTAB who asked Price Waterhouse, Vanuatu, and it was ACTTAB who paid for the advice.
Ms Follett: You had that wrong, didn't you?
MR DE DOMENICO: No; we knew the answer. Minister, seeing that you based your acceptance of the contract on the advice now given to you and asked for by ACTTAB of Price Waterhouse, the Government legal office and the Treasury, and noting that none of those three reports can be seen in any way, shape or form to be commercial-in-confidence, will you therefore table those three advices, and also table the requests for those three advices?
MR BERRY: I have tabled the advice to me by officers, Madam Speaker.
Gordon Valley Homes
MR KAINE: Madam Speaker, I have a question to Mr Wood, Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning. Minister, can you confirm that Gordon Valley Homes withdrew from the joint venture consortium Habitat only days before the company publicly declared itself unable to carry on business, and that this restructuring was agreed to by the ACT Government as a partner in Habitat? Secondly, what were the benefits that were seen to flow to the various stakeholders in this operation, including the Government, the consortium, and particularly the directors, shareholders, consultants and subcontractors and suppliers to Gordon Valley Homes, from allowing that company to withdraw from the consortium?
MR WOOD: Madam Speaker, I would have to make a careful check of dates to ensure accuracy; but I believe that Gordon Valley Homes did withdraw from that joint venture arrangement with Habitat, the consortium, before they went bankrupt. I am not sure about the full purpose of Mr Kaine's questions or the logic of those questions, so I will explain the background of it.
Gordon Valley Homes had a number of shares in the Habitat consortium, three shares, and they purchased those at $100,000 each. That money, as I understand it, was put on deposit, as other shareholders did, as part of the arrangements leading to the agreement we signed with them. I might point out that at that time we had done a very careful scrutiny of the various shareholders of Habitat, to check as far as humanly possible their viability, and we believed at that stage, some little time earlier, that Gordon Valley Homes as well as the other partners of Habitat were quite viable companies.
I understand that Gordon Valley Homes sought to withdraw because they found themselves in trouble, perhaps a little more abruptly than anybody could have imagined, and I do not believe that they expected a little time before to have that trouble. On doing so, they sought a return of the $300,000 that was part of their shareholding. In fact, the Gordon Valley Homes part of the deal, their investment, was bought out by, I think, three of the other four companies.
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