Gartrell is said to have stated that Trad had called him to ask if the deal could be pushed over the line.
After Johnson wrote to delivery authority boss Graeme Newton that night to lay out how he believed the contractors had adhered to best practice principles, his notes from a 6.30am meeting the following morning with Martyn-Jones and Gartrell Trad had “pulled” the deal, which he described as meaning believed would not be finalised by June 30.
This “stalemate” is then left with the delivery authority representatives, before a 9.40am meeting in which an additional letter was presented to Johnson’s team for signing.
Johnson says this was then later sent to him, and the inquiry is shown this came in a bundle of documents via Martyn-Jones using an “obviously unusual” Hotmail email address.
This letter included taking “relevant clauses for the agreement from the Queen’s Wharf enterprise agreement” and the issuing of a “subcontractor briefing pack to the market, including a signed copy of the agreement” based on the Queen’s Wharf subcontractor briefing pack.
Johnson says while his team had agreed that if it could accommodate clauses from the Queen’s Wharf agreement, it would, but not further than that given the view that this was an attempted workaround of the federal building code.
That was “going to be unacceptable to us”, he says, though Queen’s Wharf base pay rates were ultimately agreed to.
“By that time, we figured that unless we conceded to those rates of pay, we were going to get nowhere. So we did that,” Johnson says. The deal is ultimately struck.