By Peter FitzSimmons from The Sydney Morning Herald

By now you surely know at least the gist of the so-called #Watergate story. In July 2017 a record $79 million of taxpayers’ money was signed off on, without tender, by then water minister Barnaby Joyce for the “water rights” to two Queensland properties owned by Eastern Australia Agriculture, a company of which Joyce’s Coalition colleague and now Energy Minister Angus Taylor was once a director and secretary. That company is wholly owned by Eastern Australian Irrigation, which Taylor co-founded, and is based in the Cayman Islands.

Are you still with me, tree-people? Hang on, it gets better.

There is no suggestion anything illegal has been done a la the original Watergate. Taylor was not a director of either of these companies when the water transaction occurred. But the transaction’s lack transparency – and that the deal is of dubious worth in the first place when it is for a possible future collection of water, not existing, and that even then there are real questions as to whether such collected water, available only after flood events , can be released to help farmers and the environment downstream.

Ten days ago Hamish Macdonald, with the help of business journalist Michael West, did a major story on it for The Project to deserved wide acclaim as they shone light where much had been dark, while The Guardian’s Anne Davies has also done extensive work on the story.

Where the story truly exploded in the public domain though was a little over a fortnight ago, and therein lies a tale. At 5.30 pm on April 10 one of the twitterati by the name of “Ronni Salt” – not her true name – posted a Twitter thread containing extraordinary documentation on the whole deal.

All hell broke loose. The original post immediately went viral and journalists who re-tweeted it were served with very strong legal letters by Taylor’s lawyers. Later that night, the tweet disappeared, as did “Ronni Salt” from the Twittersphere. Stories circulated that she had been banned from Twitter, and even legally shut down.

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But who is this “Ronni Salt” and how did she come by the story?

It is a strange tale. Fearing the legal forces she claims will crush her if she is identified, she chooses to remain anonymous, but I have tracked her down to hear her tale. So how did she come to get those documents? Well, by her account, as someone who has a background in this complex field, she had a “Deep Throat”, someone she has still never met, but who – from deep within the deal done – contacted her on social media in mid-March, and after earning her trust started sending her digital copies of the extraordinarily sensitive documents. When they spoke on the phone, it was via a particular system called “Signal”, whereby the call could never be traced, going via a server in Switzerland, and in fact she says even Deep Throat’s voice was disguised.

Late on the night of releasing it all on Twitter, knowing it was out there and copies would have been made, and that powerful forces wanted her shut down, she deleted the thread and deactivated her own account. She only re-emerged late last week, but says she will never identify herself publicly, nor her Deep Throat – not even to me. She believes Taylor to be extremely sensitive to his connection to the Cayman Islands, noting how in 2013, a mere letter to the editor to the Goulburn Post that asserted among other things that “Angus Taylor had an investment company registered in the Cayman Islands” was met with such a strong Taylor reaction that the paper followed up a couple of days later with a formal apology saying the letter about his “personal financial affairs” was incorrect, and should not have been run. Taylor has always maintained he had no financial interest in EAA or EAI.

Salt also asserts – and has sent me screen shots – showing that Taylor’s wife Louise Clegg has been discussed on Wikipedia forums for trying to change her husband’s entry on his Wikipedia entry. She also sent screen shots showing that someone, not Clegg, did succeed in removing a reference to Eastern Australia Agriculture, just weeks before the $79 million transaction went through. When The Project asked Taylor last week if he was still a part of EAI, he responded with a very terse “No”, and declined to say why it was set up in the Cayman Islands.

Whatever else, it really is beyond doubt that Taylor regards his own involvement in the whole affair as very sensitive. In 2016 when Aoife Champion, the ALP candidate standing against him in Hume for both that year’s election and this one, referenced at an event Taylor’s involvement with Cayman Islands-registered EAI and water licences, she received a strong phone call the next day from a Taylor staff member who threatened defamation action if it was not removed from the video hosted on the event’s Facebook page.

I repeat: this is a very strange tale, a complicated saga. And it needs, urgently, more light. A large part of the complication is Taylor declining to give a full and frank account of the whole thing. This is a serious matter, of great public importance. As Michael West so eloquently put it, “Australia’s water buybacks scheme was designed to help drought-stricken farmers and our vital ecosystems, not to deliver a large profit for investors in a Caribbean tax haven.”

It is not unreasonable for we, the people, to seek full answers on how it came to this.

For more on this story and video go to: https://www.smh.com.au/national/all-hell-broke-loose-the-strange-story-behind-joyce-taylor-and-watergate-20190426-p51hjm.html