Confidential documents obtained by the Sydney Morning Herald reveal that the board of the NSW government rail corporation, the Transport Asset Holding Entity (TAHE), designed a redundancy scheme for senior executives in anticipation of its potential abolition by the Labor Party if it won the state election in March 2023.
The scheme, which was approved by the board on June 23, 2022, the day after the government learned of Labor’s plans, would have made CEO Benedicte Colin eligible for a redundancy payout of at least AUD272,000 if the corporation was wound up or faced any other “significant change in government policy”.
Colin, who earns almost as much as Transport for NSW Secretary Rob Sharp, would have received 24 weeks of her AUD589,375-a-year salary.
The TAHE board argued that extra “uncertainty about longevity” of the corporation due to “significant media attention and political commentary with conjecture regarding the longevity and viability of the organisation” justified the redundancy scheme.
The board also sought a generous bonus scheme for Colin and her executive team, which was approved a month later. Amid a crisis engulfing TAHE in 2021, the government decided not to approve the redundancy and bonus schemes.
TAHE, which was set up in 2015 to shift billions of dollars of expenses from NSW’s railways off the state budget and into the entity, has been the subject of a Herald investigation that triggered a parliamentary inquiry and led to the Auditor-General delaying signing off on the state’s finances due to “significant accounting issues” relating to the rail corporation.
Shadow Treasurer Daniel Mookhey called for the TAHE board to explain its intentions, while a spokesperson for the corporation said that the proposal to change the terms of employment and redundancy arrangements for the CEO was not pursued.
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