'Email lost in IT crash'

THE disputed email at the heart of the OzCar affair may have vanished when backups of Treasury IT systems failed, Godwin Grech has claimed.

Mr Grech told a Senate hearing in June of an email from the Prime Minister's office which "very simply alerted me to the case of John Grant", the Brisbane car dealer and Labor donor. Mr Grech confessed at the time his recollection could be "totally faulty" and Kevin Rudd's office quickly denied such an email existed.

Mr Grech has admitted to The Australian he faked the email used in the opposition's attack, but said he still believed there had been an email from the Prime Minister's office that could not be found.

He said in a submission to the Auditor-General that departmental IT experts advised him "that for some unexplained reason the Treasury back-up servers failed to work on three critical days in February 2009".

He claimed he and his manager David Martine were told "clearly and without qualification" if he had received an email from Mr Rudd's office on Friday, February 20, that was deleted that same day, "Treasury IT would not be able to trace it".

Ajoy Ghosh, the security executive at IT services company Logica, told The Australian he was not surprised to hear of the system failure. "The work we've done elsewhere suggests that 20 per cent of the time backup tapes either fail to record or fail to restore," Mr Ghosh said. "Either way it's not helpful."

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Source: theaustraliannews.com.au
By: Christian Kerr