Two Labor men are charged over the donations behind Chris Minns' 2015 election win in Kogarah

Former Labor upper house member Ernest Wong and Sydney restaurateur Jonathan Yee have been charged over an alleged scheme to disguise the political donations funnelled into the 2015 campaign for Kogarah, the southern Sydney seat that first carried Chris Minns into state parliament and, eventually, into the premier's office. The NSW Electoral Commission confirmed the state's Director of Public Prosecutions laid the charges on 4 June, almost seven years after the watchdog started digging.

Prosecutors allege that between October 2014 and August 2015 the two men "carried out a scheme to circumvent" Part 6 of the Election Funding, Expenditure and Disclosures Act, the law that forces parties to declare who's really behind the money they accept so voters can see who is bankrolling the people who govern them. In plain terms, the allegation is that donations were dressed up to hide their true source. Both men are entitled to the presumption of innocence, the charges are untested, and the matter is now before the courts.

The Guardian has reported that the ICAC inquiry heard Wong and Yee were allegedly involved in concealing a $10,000 donation to the Minns campaign, raised at a 2014 fundraiser. Those Kogarah donations, not the separate $100,000 cash that grabbed the headlines, are what the current charges concern.

Minns hasn't been charged, has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, and the Electoral Commission says no one else has been referred over the affair. Even so, the case sits uncomfortably close to him, because the donations at its heart were raised to win the very seat that launched his career.

The affidavit that puts Minns on the phone

In November last year a former Labor state organiser, David Latham, handed a sworn affidavit to a closed hearing of a NSW parliamentary committee. According to the ABC, which says it has seen the document, Latham alleged that after a September 2014 fundraising dinner at the Sunny Seafood restaurant, Minns rang him and said the campaign had "received a bunch of cash and the team did not collect forms or receipt it properly." Latham alleged Minns then asked words to the effect of, "Do you know how we might be able to get it in?"

Latham, who ran Minns' campaign until late 2014, alleged the then candidate said he'd instead call his best friend, the NSW Labor general secretary at the time, Jamie Clements. The allegations are untested, haven't been examined by any court, and Minns rejects them outright. The ABC has stressed it isn't suggesting the claims are true, only that they've been made. Clements has denied any wrongdoing and was the subject of no adverse finding when the corruption watchdog examined the wider scandal.

The committee's chair, Greens MLC Abigail Boyd, told parliament she'd referred the material to the corruption watchdog, the Electoral Commission and the DPP, saying members of parliament have "an obligation to report any credible knowledge of a crime." Fellow committee member Mark Latham, an independent MLC and no relation to David Latham, has used parliamentary orders to demand documents from the Premier's office over the Kogarah donations.

It isn’t the first time Minns’ name has come up. At the 2019 ICAC hearings Wong first agreed he’d been set a fundraising target for Minns’ Kogarah campaign, then under further questioning said, “Definitely not. No.” Minns told reporters outside the inquiry it was “utter nonsense” that Wong was ever set such a target, and said he didn’t believe Wong was involved in fundraising in Kogarah at all.

The Aldi bag of cash that still shadows Labor

The charges drag Labor back to the most notorious donations scandal in its modern history. In 2022 the Independent Commission Against Corruption found Wong had engaged in serious corrupt conduct over a separate $100,000 cash donation, money that turned up at Labor's Sussex Street headquarters in an Aldi shopping bag in April 2015. ICAC found the true source was billionaire businessman Huang Xiangmo, who was barred from donating because the amount blew past the $5,000 cap and he wasn't enrolled to vote.

To disguise the cash, ICAC found, Wong and Yee arranged for 12 "straw" donors to sign forms falsely claiming they'd each given $5,000 at a Chinese Friends of Labor dinner. Some of those same straw donors, the commission noted, were tied to donations recorded for the Kogarah campaign, which is why that seat has never fully shaken the affair. Huang left Australia in 2018 and was later refused re-entry after ASIO assessed him as an agent of foreign influence for Beijing. He now lives in Hong Kong.

Why Minns insists it's all old news

The Premier has been emphatic:

I absolutely reject any suggestion of wrongdoing comprehensively. Those specific allegations have already been investigated by the ICAC and the Electoral Commission. None of this is new. All of it had been ventilated in the media and the ICAC six years ago.

A spokeswoman for Minns accused the committee of "politicisation" and "selective leaks designed to damage political opponents," and said Labor had taken the donations "in good faith" before repaying them.

The Electoral Commission, for its part, says it interviewed Minns during an investigation into the Kogarah donations that ran from late 2019 until 2023, when it sent a brief of evidence to the DPP. It also stresses that the June charges against Wong and Yee are the only prosecution to come out of that work, and that it has no further lines of inquiry on foot.

Where the case goes from here

Wong and Yee will now answer the charges in a Sydney court, and with the matter before a magistrate, both the case against them and the untested claims about Minns can only be resolved there. The scheme charge is no small matter, carrying a maximum penalty of 10 years in jail. For Labor the timing could hardly be worse: the seat that made Chris Minns a Premier is back in the headlines for the wrong reasons, even as prosecutors accuse him of nothing and he rejects every suggestion that he did anything wrong.