Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison has defended his use of an international catering and logistics company to provide costings for an asylum seeker centre on Nauru.
Eurest Support Services, known as ESS, was once the largest supplier of food to the United Nations peacekeeping force, but was barred as a vendor in 2005 after becoming embroiled in a bribery scandal involving the allocation of UN contracts in Africa. ESS parent company Compass Group was forced to settle legal action for ?40 million ($A59 million) with competitors.
A Compass Group Australia executive director confirmed to Fairfax that ESS had provided the $95 million costing for the Coalition to build accommodation on Nauru to house 1350 asylum seekers. The quote was a third of the cost estimated by the Immigration Department to reopen a full-service detention centre on Nauru, but the Compass executive said ESS's costing only covered accommodation, and the firm had no expertise in immigration processing. Mr Morrison sought yesterday to distance the Coalition from ESS, issuing a statement saying it was another division of Compass, DeltaFM, which supplied the written quote.
However, Mr Morrison told Fairfax that DeltaFM and ESS were ''all part of the family of companies and all work closely together''.
Immigration Minister Chris Bowen said the costing undermined the Coalition's economic credibility: ''You don't go to a catering company for costings just because you don't like what the Department has served up.''
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