Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison has defended his use of an international catering and logistics company to provide costings for an asylum seeker centre on Nauru.
Eurest Support Services, known as ESS, was once the largest supplier of food to the United Nations peacekeeping force, but was barred as a vendor in 2005 after a bribery scandal involving the allocation of UN contracts in Africa. ESS parent company Compass Group referred to the incident as ''an unfortunate episode'' and was forced to settle legal action for £40 million with competitors.
A Compass Group Australia executive director confirmed to The Age that ESS had provided the $95 million costing for the Coalition to build accommodation on Nauru.
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The quote was a third of the cost estimated by the immigration department to reopen a full-service detention centre on Nauru, but the Compass executive said ESS's costing only covered accommodation, and the firm had no expertise in immigration processing.
Mr Morrison sought to distance the Coalition from ESS, saying it was another division of Compass, DeltaFM, that supplied the written quote.
However, Mr Morrison said that DeltaFM and ESS were ''all part of the family of companies''.
Company officials flew to Nauru at Compass' expense to provide the Coalition's quote. Mr Morrison said this did not mean Compass would automatically be granted the contract if the Coalition took government.
''The Coalition has no commercial arrangements with the organisation that provided these costings,'' he said.
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