Port of Newcastle has followed up the appointment of politically connected lobbyist Ross Cadell by hiring two "infrastructure leaders" to push its case for an expanded container terminal.
Former Hunter Business Chamber chief executive officer Glenn Thornton and former Aurizon executive Paul Brown will join Port of Newcastle in newly created roles from next week.
Mr Thornton, who had been working for engineering professional services consulting firm WSP, will be the port operator's executive manager of projects.
Mr Brown, appointed the port's executive manager of business development, was formerly general manager of growth and business development at Aurizon, the freight rail operator, and a sales director at General Electric in upstate New York.
Port of Newcastle chief executive Craig Carmody said the two executives would be "critical as the port pursues projects designed to directly contribute to the Hunter's economic recovery from COVID-19 and secure the region's long-term prosperity".
"That involves investments in a range of trade opportunities, including the proposed $1.8 billion Multi-purpose Deepwater Terminal project," Mr Carmody said.
The container terminal is the subject of an Australian Competition and Consumer Commission Federal Court case against the operators of the Botany and Port Kembla terminals.
The ACCC argues that fees imposed by the NSW government on Port of Newcastle to compensate NSW Ports, which runs the other two ports, are "illegal and anti-competitive".
Meanwhile, court documents reveal that Mayfield Development Corporation, a company now part-owned by Danish shipping giant Maersk, complained to the government in 2013 that the proposed container fees were illegal and competitive.
MDC is seeking damages from NSW Ports under the Competition and Consumer Act, alleging it was denied the commercial opportunity to build a container terminal on the former BHP Steelworks site at Mayfield when NSW Ports entered into an anti-competitive deal with the NSW government.
For Port of Newcastle, the MDC case is a sideshow to the ACCC case. But the disclosure phase of the MDC action offers details of the state's secret talks with prospective port lessees.
In a revised statement of claim last week, MDC said it had complained to state representatives between August 6 and November 8, 2013, the date the state broke off negotiations with the company.
"In a meeting on 18 October 2013, MDC informed the State that: (i) MDC disputed the legality of the [fees] arising from its anti-competitive nature ... the arrangement should not be secret; (iv) the arrangement was unfair to MDC; and (v) the constraints to be imposed on MDC were not being imposed on any other stevedore at Newcastle," MDC said.
The Botany and Kembla "port commitment deed" includes a controversial provision that the government will compensate NSW Ports if a rival entity develops a container terminal in Newcastle.
The government, in turn, later leased Newcastle to the Port of Newcastle consortium under an agreement which includes financial penalties if Port of Newcastle develops a container terminal.
The government kept the container fees secret from the public and Parliament. They were revealed by the Newcastle Herald in 2016.
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