Counsel assisting Peggy Dwyer SC dropped the payload in the last five minutes. At 3.30pm on Tuesday, with Damien Tudehope's examination before the Independent Commission Against Corruption winding down, Dwyer produced an email the former NSW Liberal finance minister had sent in February 2023. It attached a leaked draft of a parliamentary report into branch stacking in the Hills area by the Reformers. Dwyer asked Tudehope whether he had sent the draft to Jeremy Greenwood. His reply: "It appears that I did." (The Guardian)

The concession is significant because of who Greenwood is and what the draft report concerned. Greenwood is one of the group of conservative Catholic men who established the Reformers, recruiting like-minded conservatives into the Liberal Party to wrest branches from moderate and centre-right factions. He was also a key witness who refused to give evidence to the 2023 parliamentary inquiry that produced the draft report Tudehope leaked. (SMH)

That 2023 parliamentary probe investigated allegations of illicit donations and branch stacking in the Hills area. Tudehope considered the inquiry political in character. The draft report he received and then forwarded to Greenwood was the product of that process. (Yahoo News)

The timing is worth noting. During the 2023 inquiry, several key Reformers and their associates, Christian Ellis, Jean-Claude Perrottet, Charles Perrottet and Greenwood himself, had left NSW to avoid being called to give evidence. Tudehope told ICAC he had a conversation with then-premier Dom Perrottet, who said he knew his brother had gone to Fiji. Tudehope therefore knew that a key witness in the parliamentary inquiry was hiding out in Fiji. (The Age)

Operation Rosny, carrying the reference E22/1018, was escalated to a full ICAC investigation on 25 October 2022. The public inquiry opened on 27 July 2026, with transcripts running from that date. A witness-list week commenced Monday 3 August 2026, during which Tudehope and Sydney businessman Frits Maré were scheduled to appear. (ICAC; ICAC witness list)

Maré's name surfaces in a separate allegation: that Tudehope sought $50,000 from him for a branch-stacking operation in the Hills area aimed at unseating Alex Hawke. (The Saturday Paper)

Then there is the money trail. Tudehope's close friend and former law partner Michael O'Hara gave $165,000 to a number of Reformers entities after being introduced at a function held at Tudehope's home. News Corp columnist Miranda Devine was the speaker at that function. (The Guardian)

Tudehope has not been named as a person of interest in Operation Rosny. He has, however, stood down as shadow attorney-general. The distinction between not being a formal person of interest and being a witness whose conduct is being tested in public is one ICAC proceedings routinely blur, and it is doing so again here.

The broader context here is that this hearing is pulling together threads that the 2023 parliamentary inquiry could never fully resolve because its key witnesses fled the jurisdiction. Greenwood refused to give evidence. The Perrottet brothers and Ellis left the state. The inquiry produced a draft report, and that draft report then found its way from a senior Liberal figure who considered the process unfair to a man at the centre of the faction it was investigating. ICAC is now examining whether that flow of information, and the flow of money, amounts to corrupt conduct.

What sets the late-email moment apart is the forensic economy of it. Dwyer did not telegraph the question. It came at the tail end of Tudehope's time in the witness box, when a witness might reasonably think the worst was behind him. The reply, "It appears that I did," is the kind of formulation a lawyer advises a client to use when the document speaks for itself and denial is not viable. It concedes the act without volunteering anything about motive, context, or what Tudehope expected Greenwood to do with a draft report into his own faction's activities.

For the Coalition, the complication is obvious. Tudehope stood down from the shadow attorney-generalship, but he remains a Liberal MP. The party that spent 2023 watching its internal warfare spill into a parliamentary inquiry is now watching it spill into a corruption hearing, with a former premier's brother named as one of those who fled to avoid the inquiry, and the then-premier apparently aware of it. None of this is new to the people who follow NSW Liberal factional politics closely. What is new is that it is being tested under oath, with documents, in a forum where refusing to answer is not an option.