Actew Corporation managing director Mark Sullivan has denied allegations of a cover-up after the territory-owned water carrier released heavily-censored documents about the cost blow-out for the enlarged Cotter Dam.
The ACT Opposition and Greens had called on the ACT Government to seek documents from Actew that would explain why the estimated cost for the project increased from $120 million in 2005 to $363 million, but large sections were blacked out of about 1000 pages issued on Tuesday.
Mr Sullivan said yesterday the redaction had been done in accordance with legal advice Actew had received to protect commercial-in-confidence information. This also explained why even his name had been blacked out from the documents.
''It was on very senior legal advice and it's legal advice which as an officer of a corporation I must follow,'' Mr Sullivan said.
''There was legal advice saying delete people's names and some of those deletions include telephone numbers ... If I'd known that in interpreting that we'd delete everyone's name including mine it wouldn't have happened.''
Among the documents issued to the Opposition and Greens was an independent review of the cost estimate process done by accounting firm Deloittes.
Although the report endorsed the methodology used to arrive at the revised estimate of $363 million, it criticised how some of the earlier price tags had been calculated, finding, ''The scale of the discrepancy between the initial and final project cost estimates indicates that a failure at multiple stages of the cost estimate process has occurred.''
Mr Sullivan blamed a misunderstanding about how the initial estimates should have been treated. Early estimates of $120 million and $145 million had been for the cost of the building work, not the overall cost of the project.
''I think [Deloittes'] conclusion is a simple one: the preliminary estimate should never have been portrayed as the total cost of the dam,'' Mr Sullivan said.
''I think then that in terms of progressing that dollar price through government and through the regular it grew a life of its own as the total project cost of the dam. What Deloittes is saying is that somewhere that went wrong because it was never that.''
ACT Environment Minister Simon Corbell defended Actew during a Legislative Assembly committee hearing yesterday, following intense questioning from Opposition leader Zed Seselja.
''I'm satisfied that that figure is soundly based, we've got independent confirmation that the final cost of the project is a robust one and there is not any significant prospect of significant change to it,'' MrCorbell said.
Mr Corbell said the revised cost was also justified because it cost the ACT as much to maintain Stage 4 water restrictions for one year.
''Anyone who is criticising the cost should have regard to the alternative, which is Stage 4 water restrictions having an economic impact on our city of $350million every year that they're in place,'' he said.