Former NSW premier and Cricket Australia chairman Mike Baird leads the list of witnesses called to Canberra next week to appear before a parliamentary committee looking into the growing whistleblower scandal at global consulting giant KPMG.
The parliamentary joint committee (PJC) chaired by Senator Deborah O’Neill, will publicly interrogate how some of Australia’s biggest corporate names, and regulators, were kept unaware that KPMG executives were allegedly accessing and sharing sensitive information for financial gain.
“We expect complete compliance with requests for attendance and documentation,” O’Neill said.
The list includes senior partners from law firms such as Allens and Ashurst who participated in various investigations of the whistleblower allegations over two years, on behalf of KPMG.
O’Neill said that internal documents, and testimony from the law firms, will be important to help determine whether there was an ongoing cover-up by KPMG.
“They’ve used every tool, every legal tool at their disposal to gaslight the whistleblower and to prevent the proper investigation of the matters that were raised,” she said.
The scandal first came to light when O’Neill gave a speech in the Senate in March detailing the whistleblower allegations for the first time and alleging that confidential client data had been shared and potentially used to win new business with other clients.
“There are clear allegations here of profoundly unprofessional and unethical behaviour,” she said...
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