It remains to be seen if the sudden upgrading of council suppers falls within the parameters of the general manager’s performance review.

But worth noting that organising the orders to Sakura were in fact handled by the council’s manager of governance and committee services, who goes by the name of Ian Curry.

Hancock’s hotspot

Gina Rinehart’s woes in Ecuador just won’t subside.

This column revealed two weeks ago how Carlos de Miguel, the most senior executive in Rinehart’s Hanrine Ecuadorian mining operation, had been arrested and detained by police over allegations he was in possession of an arsenal of illegally-held weapons.

Rinehart’s team responded that the executive had the requisite papers for the weapons, they had been stored appropriately, and a judge had released Miguel shortly after he was detained. Miguel himself spoke out after the arrest, threatening to sue Ecuador’s interior minister Maria Paula Romo and the national police for “procedural fraud” over the raids, which he called a “premeditated attack to block his activities at Hanrine.”

Now, he’s upping his attack on the government. He has hired international investigations firm Kroll to probe two government ministers including Romo, a Quito law firm, a media outlet, and any connections to a Chilean mining giant. Not messing around, clearly.

It’s worth noting Hanrine, which owns a copper concession at Imbabura in the north of Ecuador, has a lot on the line in the frontier mining region. The mining giant has also submitted an expression of interest in a lucrative undeveloped mining concession in the south known as Llurimagua, with the potential for a billion-dollar payday.

But they haven’t had their way yet.

Or as Miguel’s defence lawyer Emiliano Donoso told Ecuador’s Plan V newspaper.

“The Hanrine company has sent several letters to the president, the comptroller, and the attorney, offering USD 420 million for the project,” he said. “They have not accepted.”

Hancock Prospecting declined to comment.

A quiet word with the lawyers

Another big political exposé from The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and 60 Minutes on Sunday night ruffled political feathers, this time in the Victorian Liberals. But it also left another unlikely political entity unhappy, the subject of the last exposé, former Victorian minister Adem Somyurek.

The dramatic promo of the 60 Minutes report last week reminded everyone how Nick McKenzie exposed Somyurek’s foul mouth towards gays and women, plus allegations that the minister, ministerial advisers and electorate officers were involved in branch stacking.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews sacked Somyurek from cabinet and he resigned from the Labor Party. In the aftermath, two other ministers went and Labor elders Steve Bracks and Jenny Macklin rode in to sort out the mess.

Now it emerges that the disgraced former powerbroker, on the QT, has been in contact with lawyers about his defamation options, which presumably could include taking on this masthead, as well as individuals featured in the reports.

Potential roadblocks: investigations by the Independent Broad-based Anti-Corruption Commission and the Victorian Ombudsman. The timeframe for their investigations is not yet known.

Intriguingly, Somyurek himself was not doing the legal ring-around. It was none other than Labor operative Andrew Landeryou, husband of Labor senator Kimberley Kitching, neither of whom had been the subject of any allegations in the Somyurek investigation.

Landeryou and Somyurek go way back.

It was in 2017 when former Labor leader and Right faction heavyweight Bill Shorten memorably left the Bennelong byelection campaign trail in NSW to fly south to meet Somyurek, Plumbers’ Union secretary Earl Setches and Landeryou. It was that meeting which reset Victorian Labor politics, shoring up the alliance deal that joined factions and unions of the party’s Right, including Shorten’s Australian Workers Union, with the industrial unions of the Left, including the CFMMEU and the Rail, Tram and Bus Union.

Nice to see old pals keeping in contact.