AFTER a steady upward trajectory for several years, Godwin Grech's public service career has been marked of late by a series of sideways shifts - although they were moves that kept him close to the policy action of the Howard and Rudd governments.
Mr Grech, 42, is the man at the centre of the Canberra sensations over an allegedly forged email.
He has been a public servant for about 20 years and has a reputation as being highly diligent if somewhat eccentric.
He likes advising younger colleagues on how to advance their careers, although some of his interlocutors regarded him as a little on the paternalistic side.
Mr Grech has spent most of his career in Treasury, the elite Canberra department that prides itself on the intellectual rigour of its analysis. He wears his economically rationalist heart on his sleeve, describing himself as a "believer in the positive power of the market".
In the late 1990s Mr Grech had executive assignments in Treasury's markets group dealing with financial institutions and systems and with competition and market access policy.
By 2003 he had risen to the senior position of general manager of Treasury's competition and consumer policy division, according to Hansard records. The position put him just two levels below the Treasury secretary in the department's organisational structure, but he held it for just a few months.
By early 2005 he had moved to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, working for three years in effect in a level below his position at Treasury.
After the change of government in 2007 Mr Grech may have spent a lot of time responding to requests for briefs from one Andrew Charlton in the Prime Minister's office, an economist more than 10 years the public servant's junior.
In the early months of the Labor Government Dr Charlton was Mr Rudd's adviser on employment, business conditions, competition and consumer affairs. In a strange twist, the concocted email that has now involved Mr Grech was supposed to have been written by Dr Charlton.
Then, in June last year, Mr Grech was offered a position as a policy director in a strategic policy division set up for the Prime Minister.
A couple of months after that sideways shift, Mr Grech returned to Treasury as a principal adviser in its financial systems division.
Late last year he was given the huge project of pulling together the Government's emergency response to the crisis in motor dealer finance. It was that assignment that inextricably involved him in the Ozcar affair.
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