Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. I refer to his previous answer. Why, according to reports, did the Prime Minister cause an agreement to be reached to ensure that his private company would be repaid more than $1 million before the workers employed by PlayUp received the $1.2 million in wages that they were owed?

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I believe I dealt with this in my previous answer, but let me be quite clear. While my wife and I invested in Revo Pty Ltd, which is the company that had the PlayUp online site application, at no time were we responsible for or involved in the management of the company, nor did we have any insight into the management of the company other than such accounts as the company produced for the benefit of their shareholders and investors. The responsibility for paying employees is, obviously, something that lies with the management of the company and the directors of the company, and we did not number among those people. We were very much outside investors.

Just to recap, the investment was made in 2012. When I became the communications minister in 2013, I disposed of a large number of investments, with the objective of ensuring that our portfolio was comprised, as far as possible—at least in terms of financial equity assets—of large managed funds, and that is, broadly speaking, the position that it reached. So we sought to sell the shares in Revo.

It is a private company. It needed the consent of the board to sell the shares. They proposed that the shares be sold to an associated company, Revo Nominees Pty Ltd. So that was at their request and it was their decision. I would have preferred to have sold them to a third party, but it was a private company and we were in their hands in that respect. The payment of the purchase price was, as I said, due in a year or when they did a capital raising. The payment was not made after 12 months. Then, in an entirely arms-length manner, our son, Alex, negotiated with the company to secure payment terms. Some of those payments were made; most of them were not. So, at every level, it was a completely arms-length transaction.

Now, there may well be criticism of the directors; there may well be criticism about whether an administrator should have been appointed sooner. All of those criticisms can be made, but they cannot be directed at external creditors such as us. The honourable member knows this full well, and his attempt to compare that to a business that is actually controlled, or that has been controlled, by another honourable member here is quite unworthy, and it is a very, very low and unworthy smear from someone so learned in the law as him.