A witness at a corruption inquiry has admitted she used a bathroom break during the hearing on Friday to make a telephone call asking a family member to hide evidence that may have incriminated her boss, who is linked to the NSW Labor Party.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Patricia Siu, a cashier and waitress at the Emperor's Garden restaurant in Chinatown, had finished giving evidence at the Independent Commission Against Corruption on Friday when she was recalled to give urgent evidence about a phone call she made during a short morning adjournment.
Giving evidence via a translator, Ms Siu admitted she made a call to her brother-in-law in Cantonese while she was in the bathroom and asked him to "help me hide" two folders of documents.
Ms Siu had been asked during her evidence to produce a document that may have incriminated her boss, Jonathan Yee, in an alleged scheme by the NSW Labor Party to circumvent the state's ban on donations from property developers to bank $100,000 in cash from billionaire developer Huang Xiangmo before the March 2015 state election.
The cash was allegedly delivered by Mr Huang to the party's Sydney headquarters in an Aldi bag. Mr Huang denies making the donation.
Ms Siu was asked to surrender her phone to the ICAC. Asked why she made the phone call, Ms Siu said: "Because I want to help Jonathan."
Earlier on Friday, Ms Siu had told the ICAC that she had agreed to lie about making a $10,000 donation to the NSW Labor Party and Country Labor in March 2015.
Ms Siu said she did so at the request of Mr Yee, who has ties to the NSW Labor Party. Mr Yee sought Labor preselection in 2012 to run as the party's candidate for Sydney lord mayor and later ran unsuccessfully as a Labor candidate for the City of Sydney council in 2016.
Mr Yee allegedly told her to persist in the lie because "there is no evidence to prove against it anyway".
But Ms Siu said Mr Yee had told her "last weekend" that he now planned to tell the truth to the ICAC.
Asked why she had decided to tell the truth about the donation, Ms Siu said: "Because you have evidence to prove the crime in relation to the donation."
The ICAC has heard evidence from members of Sydney's Chinese community that they agreed to act as straw donors, which helped disguise the source of the $100,000, and signed false donation declarations at the request of Mr Yee, whose family owns the Emperor's Garden restaurant.
Ms Siu said during her evidence that she was given a document with handwritten answers by Mr Yee to help her lie to the Electoral Commission, and agreed to produce it to the corruption watchdog. The inquiry heard this was the document she sought to hide from the ICAC.
Ms Siu said a few weeks after she received a summons in July to appear at the ICAC's public hearings, she was told to "go up[stairs] to see someone" in a private dining room in the Emperor's Garden "and it turned out to be [former NSW Labor MP] Ernest Wong".
She said Mr Wong told her to persist in the lie that she had made the $10,000 donation and "things will be okay; nothing will happen".
On Thursday a former assistant manager of the Emperor's Garden, Johnnie Lin, admitted he had also agreed to sign false declarations. He said he had been summoned to a meeting with Mr Wong in the restaurant's VIP room where Mr Wong was "begging for me or requesting me" to maintain the lies he had previously told the Electoral Commission.
The inquiry continues.
- SMH/The Age
