Former Sustainable Land Strategy director Greg Ellis - who negotiated the Dickson deal between the government and the CFMEU-owned club in 2013 - has broken his silence to give an insight into the way the deal was brokered.

He said it was clear to him the government wanted the union to win the tender and buy the block. But he was not specifically instructed to that effect and the political reality did not change the way he did the job - he played hardball with the club and hammered out the best deal he could, he said.

Mr Ellis also insists the deal could have collapsed if the Tradies had not been prepared to pay a decent price.

Dr Maxine Cooper’s audit into the land swap found the Economic Development Directorate didn't conduct the tender effectively, didn't achieve an open, contestable and transparent market process and looked not to have achieved value for money. She found the government gave significant concessions to the club, worth up to $2.65 million, a finding both Mr Ellis and club chief executive Rob Docker dispute.

Mr Ellis says the audit should have given more consideration to the impact of political decisions. He insists the deal he brokered was done within the law and got the best price possible given the circumstances.

The Tradies ended up paying much more than they bid at the 2012 tender, and while the auditor suggested a $2.65 million loss, it was in fact a $1.385 million gain on the tender price, he said.

“The Tradies thought they were being stiffed, quite frankly. They could never believe how come they were in a situation where the deal could only go ahead if they paid the additional $1 million and all the extra car spaces. As far as they were concerned, they were way ahead of the next bidder and why wasn’t that the market’s price?”

But he said the auditor-general and the public were right to ask questions about the final deal, brokered after he left in 2014, which made significantly more concessions to the Tradies club than the deal he negotiated in 2013.

Mr Ellis’s decision to go public comes after frustration that a submission he made to an ACT parliamentary inquiry three months ago has not been made public, nor has he been called to give evidence.

Mr Ellis has also revealed that in January, he made a complaint to the Speaker about the way the auditor had conducted her inquiry.

Asked about his allegations, the standing committee on public accounts said the matters were "complex and are the subject of ongoing, private deliberation".

"The committee considers many matters in deciding whether to publish submissions, it is not automatic. The committee neither confirms nor denies that it is conducting an inquiry into a complaint made against the auditor-general."

The audit office said it had received a complaint and had provided a detailed response to the complainant, also passing on the complaint and response to the committee.

Mr Ellis said the Tradies had previously tried three times to buy the car park adjacent to the Tradies club in Dickson but the government didn’t like the optics of selling land directly to union friends and donors, so decided to go to competitive tender.

The political pressure came at the end of 2011 when he was told to advertise the block before the  end of the financial year – which was code, he says, for before the 2012 election. If the Liberals won, the union’s chances of securing the block would have taken a dive. An adviser from Chief Minister Andrew Barr’s office called him every week or two to check progress that year.

“The government’s real objective was to give their political ally the one chance they thought they could to get this done before October 2012 election,” Mr Ellis said. “You call it land for mates. What it was was competitive auction for mates.”

Asked about the regular calls to check progress, a spokesman for Mr Barr said on Wednesday, "it is the role of a ministerial advisor to ensure that the Cabinet decision was enacted."

Mr Ellis said while it was clear to him Labor wanted the union to win, he was never instructed to give special treatment to the union and he didn’t. The political background did not lessen his determination to get as much money as he could from the Tradies.

“Just setting the parameters and playing hard ball is part of the negotiations and I reject any suggestion, with the greatest respect, that we implied in any way, shape or form the fact I thought that the government wanted the Tradies to win was in any way a factor in anything we did.

“ ... I just understand the political context. If I was an ingenue who had no idea about who the government and the Tradies were, I think I could be quite vulnerable, I could go into a negotiation and get smooched by people who actually had relationships and agendas I didn't know."

The audit report said there no evidence to support Mr Ellis's claim that the government wanted the Tradies to win.

Mr Barr's spokesman pointed to that finding.

'The chief minister advised [the auditor] that neither he nor, to his knowledge, other members of the government signalled a preference for the Tradies to be the successful tenderer to territory officials either formally or informally," he said.

Mr Barr's spokesman said Cabinet agreed to the sale by tender, including conditions to ensure the land was used in line with the Dickson masterplan on September 11, 2012.

Mr Ellis said his December 2013 agreement was reasonable and could be justified, and when he put it to Land Development Agency chief David Dawes, Mr Dawes agreed.

He does not understand why major new concessions to the Tradies were made in 2014, after he left the public service, including removing restrictions on what could be built on the new site. Mr Ellis believes the audit unfairly lays blame on him and doesn’t make a strong enough distinction between concessions made in 2013 and 2014.

He said the audit fails to fully investigate decisions taken at the political level by Mr Barr and his cabinet colleagues. The decision to rush to sale before the 2012 election meant the territory would not maximise its profits on the deal.

“I’m not doing the government’s bidding, I’m following the government's instruction to have the tender advertised at a breakneck speed, under terms which wouldn’t necessarily have maximised value. In those contexts I played hardball and extracted as much value as I possibly could and that was certainly the best deal we could have got at that time from anyone...

“What I objected to was the auditor general in her report suggesting that because I thought the government wanted the Tradies to win that I couldn’t do my job. I never felt like I couldn’t do my job," he said.

Asked on Wednesday about the suggestion that the audit had focused on public servants rather than politicians, the audit office said, "The audit conclusions and findings were made on the available evidence. This was done through rigorously applying the audit method ... Where there was mention of the minister, the minister was requested to respond."

Mr Ellis also revealed that the missing box of documents detailing negotiations was his material that had been boxed up and sent to the Land Development Agency after he left and thereafter appears to have gone missing. But he said the box would not contain as many documents as had been suggested, given there were only two or three face to face meetings with the union in 2013.