Jean-Claude Perrottet, the younger brother of former NSW premier Dominic Perrottet, appeared before the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) on 5 August 2026. ICAC is the state's corruption watchdog — a body that investigates wrongdoing by politicians and public officials. It is running a public inquiry called Operation Rosny into whether people in the NSW Liberal Party broke electoral funding laws and stacked branches.

Branch stacking is a simple idea with serious consequences. It means recruiting lots of people to join a political party — sometimes by paying their membership fees for them — so you can control who gets chosen as a candidate and who wins internal party votes. In NSW, it is against the law when it involves donations that are not allowed.

The hearings began on 27 July 2026 and are set to run for eight weeks. ICAC has published official transcripts for 31 July, 4 August and 5 August. Perrottet appeared across multiple days, including the 5 August session (ICAC transcript, 5 August 2026). He told the commission he would, on occasion, pay for party memberships during his time with a group inside the Liberal Party called the Reformers (SMH, 5 August 2026).

The Reformers first appeared in the news in 2019. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that elements of the Liberal Party's hard right were trying to push out sitting members in safe seats across Sydney's north-west. The reports named Jean-Claude Perrottet and fellow staffer Christian Ellis, both then working in the electorate office of Damien Tudehope, the minister for small business. The articles were the first public mention of the Reformers, described as a conservative Catholic group alleged to be behind a branch-stacking operation funded by illegal donations (The Guardian, 5 August 2026).

Both Perrottet and Ellis left Tudehope's office within months of the 2019 article. Perrottet had already been building a career in the conservative Catholic wing of the Liberal Party. In 2018, while studying commerce at the University of NSW, he got a job with upper house MP David Clarke, a figure long associated with the party's right faction. He returned to Tudehope's office in 2019, this time in the ministerial wing.

The matter reached ICAC through parliament. In 2022, NSW Liberal state MP Ray Williams, one of the MPs the Reformers were said to have targeted, used a late-night speech in the Legislative Assembly to raise the alarm about the faction's activities. Two days later, Dominic Perrottet, by then premier, referred the Reformers matter to ICAC. The allegations included attempts to take over the Hills Shire Council and claims that developer Jean Nassif had given the Reformers "significant funds". A parliamentary inquiry into Hills Shire Council followed, sitting in the months before the 2023 NSW election.

The commission has also heard that Liberal powerbrokers left their mobile phones in their cars before talking about faction business, apparently to avoid being traced (The Guardian, 3 August 2026). That detail gives a sense of how carefully the faction operated.

Jean-Claude Perrottet's personal history carries its own political weight. In 2015, after an end-of-year formal at St John's College, Sydney University, an alcohol-fuelled incident with a 19-year-old woman led to rape charges. In 2017, a NSW District Court jury took less than two hours to find him not guilty. He was 20 at the time. The Perrottet family is large: Dominic is one of 12 siblings. Jean-Claude's appearance at ICAC puts the former premier's family inside the commission's frame, though he is appearing as a witness, not as a person of interest.

ICAC says the inquiry covers possible offences under the Electoral Funding Act and other matters. The commission has not said whether findings will be sent to prosecutors; that decision usually comes after the hearings finish and a report is written.

The wider picture is ugly for the NSW Liberals. The party lost government at the March 2023 election and has since churned through opposition leaders. An eight-week public hearing into factional operations, where witnesses talk about paid memberships and leaving phones in cars to avoid detection, will test whatever resilience the party has left.

The commission's timetable means evidence will keep coming well into September. More witnesses are expected as Operation Rosny works through the network of staffers, MPs and donors connected to the Reformers' activities in Sydney's north-west and the Hills District.