A major league scam went down on Monday night (2/9/19) where Nine Entertainment Chairman, known fraudster and former federal treasurer Peter Costello destroyed the media companies reputation to raise $700,000 for his mate PM Scott Morrison and the Liberal Party.

The fundraiser, which cost $10,000 per person to attend, was held at the Channel Nine studios in Sydney and was attended by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, numerous federal ministers, mining executives, the bank’s top lobbyist former Queensland Premier Anna Bligh and other business people. (Click here to read more)

I have been reporting for months about Peter Costello and his extremely close relationship with Prime Minister Scott Morrison and how that relationship is very profitable for Peter Costello and I suspect vice versa.

The media have been reporting the matter but almost all have refused to report anything about Peter Costello except to say he wasn’t at the fundraiser and imply he had nothing to do with it which the reality is, it has his fingerprints all over it.

There were lobbyists from all areas of big business but what is not well-known or reported is that Peter Costello is also a lobbyist via his company ECG Financial Pty Ltd who has made $millions lobby the government through his Liberal Party contacts. Costello is certain to make $millions more from Liberal Party contacts given he has now helped them raise $700,000.

I wrote an article on the 24th of February 2019 titled “Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his puppet master Peter Costello” and I think the $700,000 Nine fundraiser has proven the title to be true. I started the article off saying.

Former Federal Treasurer Peter Costello has his fingerprints all over Prime Minister Scott Morrison as his puppet master, the $50 billion submarine contract scam and the federal government via his chairmanships of ECG Financial Pty Ltd, Nine and the $150 billion Future Fund. There is also documented evidence that Peter Costello has been deliberately hiding his lobbying activity from state and federal governments.

My investigation and ASIC company searches show that Peter Costello is a current financial owner of ECG Financial Pty Ltd and was previously a financial owner of the sister company ECG Advisory Solutions which I reported last week has made $millions from a dodgy deal to give advice in the $50 Billion submarine contract. There’s also a prima facie case that Prime Minister Scott Morrison helped orchestrate the deal for ECG and his mates Costello and David Gazard who is a director and 50% shareholder of ECG Advisory via his company GPJT Pty Ltd.

There is clearly musical chairs being played by Peter Costello and others to hide the truth and the fraud and thefts. Specifically what is being hidden is that Peter Costello makes a lot of money lobbying the government for large companies.

How it works:

There are 2 companies and one of them, ECG Advisory Solutions, is also a registered lobbying company and that seems to have become a problem as it was being widely published on the lobbyist registers that Peter Costello’s private company was a shareholder in the company but he was not listed as one of the lobbyists. Yet he is the Chairman of the sister company ECG Financial.

Where this obviously became a problem for Costello is for example the $50 billion submarine deal where it was reported that Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s mate David Gazard was appointed as an adviser. (Click here to read more) That is extremely concerning and needs investigating but it would have been a million times worse if the media had also reported that Peter Costello and/or his company had been appointed as an advisor. They must have realized a few years ago that having the Peter Costello link was a possible problem so he sold his shares is ECG Advisory but kept his shares in the sister company ECG Financial. (Click here to read the full article)

That article was a follow-up to the previous week when I published an article titled “Prime Minister Scott Morrison, his best mate David Gazard and the $50 billion submarine scam” on the 16th of February 2019 which started off:

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s best mate and closest political advisor, David Gazard, is profiting $millions from the $50 billion submarine contract Australia finalised this week with the French state-owned shipbuilder Naval Group. Naval Group is still under investigation for bribing Malaysia’s former leader Najib Razak US$128 million.

What is becoming clear is that the $50 billion submarine contact is a money grab for numerous Liberal Party cronies which is disturbing given Naval Group was previously investigated by the Australian Senate in 2016 for bribery in Australia via one of their subsidiaries.

Firstly, we’ll look at the bribery allegations against Naval group and Naval Group’s former Australian operations CEO Sean Costello who was a former Liberal Party staffer and then David Gazard’s relationship with Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Naval Group. (Click here to read the full article)

I went on to say in the article:

Scott Morrison and the David Gazard connection. And now add the Peter Costello connection

Scott Morrison and David Gazard

David Gazard is the man who Scott Morrison went to for advice during the leadership showdown between Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull in September 2015. The SMH reported in 2016 in an article titled “Scott Morrison’s relentless rise to power“:

“On the evening of September 14, 2015 Tony Abbott’s prime ministership was hanging by a thread. Abbott had made Morrison a last-minute offer to join him on a leadership ticket and to take over Joe Hockey’s job as Treasurer. Hunkered down in his Parliament House office over a home-made curry, Morrison gamed his next move with his close friend David Gazard, a former Howard and Costello staffer, while Costello offered advice over the phone.“ (Click here to read more)

I wrote the above article’s in February 2016 about Peter Costello, David Gazard and their lobbying companies but since then it has been reported that the lobbying firm ECG Advisory closed down on the 31st of July. Gazard has set up a new political advisory and government relations business DPG Advisory Solutions but doesn’t seem to have a website yet.

Peter Costello, David Gazard and Jonathan Epstein launch their firm ECG in 2011.

It sounds like they closed down links to each other, doesn’t it? Well no, they still have ECG Financial alive and well whose shareholders are Peter Costello, Jonathan Epstein and David Gazard who are the same three amigos who set up ECG Advisory. ECG Financial makes its money by advising “on mergers and acquisitions, foreign investment, competition and regulatory issues which affect business in Australia.” such as the dodgy $50 billion submarine scam.

Scott Morrison’s links to the same people should not surprise given he was likely sacked as Managing Director of Tourism Australia in 2006 because of fraud and theft. (Click here to read more)

Now back to looking at the $700,000 raised by Nine Entertainment, with the further details I have reported above, and it becomes even more disturbing that Peter Costello used Nine Entertainment to raise money for Scott Morrison and the Liberal Party. A question that no one has seemed to ask is if David Gazard was at the fundraiser?

The perceived bias, if not real bias, by Nine in raising the money was obvious to all including Channel 10 journalist Hugh Riminton who Tweeted:

There are too many questions that the old media have refused to ask about the $700,000 fundraiser. Nine Entertainment who owns Channel Nine, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age in Melbourne and The Australian Finacial Review came under heavy criticism for holding the fundraiser as it made them look like nothing more than an extension of the Liberal Party.

Journalists working at Nine’s papers published a letter to management critical on the fundraiser as it damages the credibility of the papers which said in part:

“raised the question of where the Nine newspapers’ political loyalties lie”.

“The former Fairfax mastheads have a long history of political independence,” the journalists said.

“If this has changed and we are now associated with the Liberal Party, this should be conveyed to staff. A decision to host fundraisers for Labor or other political parties would be of equal concern.

“Our mastheads have done much to expose the corrupting influence of money on politics. It is vitally important that we remain independent of the political process.” (Click here to read more)

How many of the Nine journalists who criticized management for the fundraiser have reported about their Chairman Peter Costello’s involvement in lobbying? None, because they are obviously not allowed to.

Many voters have always had an issue with Nine Entertainment having former federal Treasurer and Liberal Party MP Peter Costello as Chairman but it became much worse with the $700,000 fundraiser. That needs to added to the fact that the group executive editor of The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, James Chessell, is a former media advisor to former federal treasurer Joe Hockey from Jul 2006 – Oct 2007 when he was the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations.

Nine are now skating on thin ice when it comes to their credibility for unbiased news and they need to sack Chairman Peter Costello to try and claw some credibility back.

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