A red vest, gold watch, and $165k secret: The elderly millionaire who funded a Liberal takeover

Moments before the Independent Commission Against Corruption started prising open the juicy details of a five-year campaign of personal greed and political ambition, an elderly man dressed in a red vest, yellow tie, charcoal suit and sparkling gold watch shuffled into the hearing room and took a seat in the public gallery. Regrettably for Michael O’Hara, he was not a casual observer. Instead, the softly spoken millionaire hotelier had the dubious honour of being the first witness at a blockbuster inquiry probing the murky links between the NSW Liberal Party, fugitive developer Jean Nassif, and a cluster of other questionable characters.

To make his situation worse, the 83-year-old O’Hara has stage-four cancer – a melanoma on his right lung – and is undergoing chemotherapy. His wife died last year. Looking as though he’d be more accustomed to the plush wing chairs of the Australian Club than the witness box of a major corruption hearing, O’Hara took notes on a tatty writing pad throughout the morning as the extent of Operation Rosny was outlined in breathtaking detail.

At one point, he walked into a packed media room and said a polite “G’day” before realising where he was and making a hasty retreat. O’Hara is arguably a relatively small player in a series of complex schemes which have been unpicked by ICAC investigators since 2022. But his involvement demonstrates the lengths some went to conceal their activities.

The funds handed over by O’Hara and others propped up a long-running campaign by a group of right-faction agitators named the Reformers to seize control of branches across Sydney. Some Reformers then also sought to use their growing influence within the party to do the bidding of Nassif and his now-collapsed property empire, Toplace. Counsel assisting the commission, Dr Peggy Dwyer, SC, used her opening address to warn fake invoices, dodgy bank accounts, shadowy corporate structures and other plots being investigated by the ICAC were much more than wrongdoing or potential criminality.

It was, in fact, an assault on democracy which could undermine elections and government decisions. O’Hara is alleged to have paid a total of $40,000 into a Westpac bank account controlled by the Reformers. One payment was made under the description “DEPOSIT MICHAEL O’HARA donat2reformers”.

Documents also show he paid a further $125,000 to the Reformers via sham invoices and monthly retainers, sometimes under the title “strategic wealth strategy investment advice”. Dwyer told the hearings the “bogus” payments were a sham, with their true purpose to conceal donations designed to support the empire-building agenda of the Reformers. O’Hara, a deeply religious and conservative man who liked the faction’s views on issues such as gay marriage, abortion and euthanasia, was happy to stump up to support the cause.

In the Reformers, O’Hara saw kindred spirits. In O’Hara, the Reformers saw a cash cow. However, O’Hara’s $165,000 in payments is dwarfed by the $2 million Nassif is alleged to have given various Reformers in the hope they might install councillors and potentially even cabinet ministers who would be supportive of his development agenda.

But O’Hara’s $165,000 contribution was still well above the donations cap of $6100, and even if they had been declared, O’Hara was a prohibited donor because of his line of work. When he took the stand after lunch, the lawyer-turned-hotel owner said he had been a member of the Liberal Party on and off since the early 1970s and was recently planning to resign because the organisation was “a bit toxic”. But party officials tore up O’Hara’s membership after he was subpoenaed for the ICAC’s inquiry.

“So I didn’t have to resign. They cut me!” he said.

He also criticised former premier Dominic Perrottet for going “woke” after succeeding Gladys Berejiklian in late 2021, and complained that some other Liberals in NSW had a worldview more aligned to teal independents or the Greens. O’Hara recalled being approached by Reformers members Christian Ellis and Robert Assaf in 2018 to support their movement. “I was happy to donate to people who had similar views,” O’Hara said.

Ellis and Assaf are just two men in the spotlight at the ICAC. Others include the brothers of former premier Dominic Perrottet, Jean-Claude and Charles, and the powerful chief executive officer of Catholic Schools NSW Dallas McInerney. Pressed by Dwyer, the 83-year-old O’Hara repeatedly struggled to explain why he had not disclosed the donations.

He appeared to suggest that he didn’t think he needed to because the Reformers weren’t a political party. O’Hara was also questioned on why he had reported donations to Fred Nile’s Christian Democratic Party and the conservative campaign group Advance, but not the Reformers. “I was not donating to a political party,” he insisted.

“There’s no way I would have given a cent to the Liberal Party. “I now know … that it’s an incredibly wide definition of what donations are as far as political