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Former NSW Labor Minister Ian Macdonald jailed for 10 years for misconduct

Former NSW State Labor Minister Ian Macdonald is lead from a prison van at the Supreme Court in Sydney on Friday. Photo: AAP

Former NSW State Labor Minister Ian Macdonald is lead from a prison van at the Supreme Court in Sydney on Friday. Photo: AAP

Former NSW Labor minister Ian Macdonald is sentenced to 10 years’ jail over the decision to grant a mining licence to a company run by former union boss John Maitland, who will spend at least four years behind bars.

In March, Macdonald was found guilty of misconduct in a public office.

Maitland, once the head of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), was found guilty of being an accessory.

The decision to grant the licence was made in 2008, when Macdonald was the NSW minister for Primary Industries and Mineral Resources in the Iemma Labor government.

Macdonald was given a non-parole period of seven years, while Maitland was sentenced to six years in prison, and will not be eligible for parole until 2021.

Macdonald clasped his hands and folded his arms at times during the three-hour sentencing hearing in Sydney on Friday, and appeared composed when Justice Christine Adamson eventually announced his punishment.

In sentencing, Justice Adamson described Macdonald as “devious” and said he had betrayed the people of NSW.

“The coal resources of New South Wales, which should have been used for the benefit of the whole society, were squandered by the criminal conduct of the very person who was trusted to safeguard them,” she said.

‘He bragged to his staff’

She said Macdonald had a misplaced sense of entitlement and that both men did not have good prospects of rehabilitation and had shown no remorse for their crimes.

“Mr Macdonald did the wrong thing,” Justice Adamson said.

“He was brazen about it. He bragged to his staff about the authority the legislature had given to him.”

During the trial, Macdonald’s lawyers argued he granted the Hunter Valley mining licence to Maitland’s company, Doyles Creek Mining, because of the merits of the proposal, not because they were “mates”.

However, the Crown alleged during the trial the decision by Macdonald to give the licence to Maitland lost the state tens of millions of dollars at a time of “budget constraints”.

The charges in court followed an Independent Commission Against Corruption finding against Macdonald in 2013.

Macdonald will also be stripped of his parliamentary pension, after the Berejiklian Government passed legislation on Thursday to stop payments to former politicians who are convicted of serious offences after they leave office.

Macdonald will be back in court later this year — earlier this week he was committed to stand trial on conspiracy charges with fellow former Labor frontbench colleague Eddie Obeid.

Those charges relate to a coal exploration licence involving a property owned by the Obeid family in the Bylong Valley near Mudgee.

—ABC

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