The New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, has concerns the former minister for the Hunter Tim Crakanthorp may have acted for “private interests” while in the cabinet, prompting a referral to the state’s corruption watchdog.
Minns dumped the Newcastle MP this week after becoming aware of “substantial private land holdings” owned by his wife and parents-in-law that he failed to disclose – a breach of the ministerial code.
Minns said Newcastle had “the potential for development” but would not be drawn on his specific concerns, other than to say he had some.
“If there is or there has been a concern about him acting in his public capacity for potential private interests, that needs to be investigated,” he said on Thursday morning.
“I do have concerns about that. I’m being honest about it. That’s why I’ve referred it to the Icac.”
Minns said he was made aware of the extent of the properties on Wednesday which led him to sack Crakanthorp.
Crakanthorp faced questions about his family’s property interests while serving as a local councillor nearly a decade ago.
In 2014, before the then local councillor was elected into parliament to represent Newcastle, the Newcastle Herald reported Crakanthorp’s parents-in-law, Joe and Santina Manitta, owned a large development site in the coastal city.
The Herald reported that Crakanthorp faced questions at the time, given the site would likely have needed to be bought by the government if a proposed bypass being championed by the future MP went ahead.
At the time, Crakanthorp issued a statement saying: “I put this on the public record several years ago.”
Further publicly available documents show Crakanthorp’s in-laws have worked as developers in the region for three decades.
“For the last 30 years, we have developed property in the Wickham and Carrington area,” Crakanthorp’s in-laws wrote in a 2013 letter regarding the Newcastle state environmental planning policy.
Guardian Australia does not suggest these properties are those that led to the minister’s sacking and does not suggest any wrongdoing on Crakanthorp’s part or his in-laws’ part in relation to those properties.
In relation to the recent allegations, the premier on Thursday rejected the proposition that he should have or could have known about Crakanthorp’s in-laws’ extensive property holdings outside the disclosure.
“MPs and ministers are responsible for complying with the ministerial code,” he said.
“A reasonable person would say the premier of the day, or the cabinet of the day, shouldn’t have and wouldn’t reasonably have eyes on the property interests of the in-laws of a member of parliament.”
He said it was up to the ministers and MPs to ensure their records were accurate and the onus could not be on the premier’s department.
Late on Wednesday, Crakanthorp made a statement in the parliament stating he had initially omitted a property owned by his wife when he made his first declaration as a minister.
After lodging a new disclosure with the initially omitted property, he says he learned of more properties owned by his in-laws in Broadmeadow which “represented a conflict of interest”.
“In recent days, I notified the premier’s office that I have now spoken to both my in-laws and my siblings-in-law to assemble a full list of each of their interests, and I’ve provided those to the premier’s office,” he told the house just before 9pm Wednesday.
“I appreciate and firmly believe that ministers must be held to the highest standards and we would like to note that this oversight was identified due to my own self-reporting.”
The opposition leader, Mark Speakman, has called on the government to explain which properties were not disclosed and what decisions had been made about the Hunter that needed to be reviewed in light of the potential conflict of interest.
“Those [ministerial] disclosures of family members are not available to the public – they’re made to the premier,” he said.
“We do know that [in the] Newcastle byelection in 2014, some commercial property holdings of his family were a matter of some public controversy. I don’t know whether they were what was not disclosed. We just don’t know.”
Despite the significant holdings revealed on Wednesday, Crakanthorp’s most recently available disclosure from 2022 contains just two properties part-owned with his wife. One is their primary place of residence in Newcastle and another is an apartment in Darlinghurst.
Ministers are separately and privately required to disclose further details when they are sworn in.
