Nick McKenzie & Richard Baker; 15/10/08
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s chief infrastructure adviser, businessman Rod Eddington, has resigned from the advisory board of a secretive British corporate intelligence firm after accusations that the dual roles amounted to a conflict of interest.The resignation of Sir Rod, who is the head of Infrastructure Australia, comes after The Age reported yesterday that he had an unpaid role advising Hakluyt & Co. The firm, founded in the 1990s by former British intelligence officers, provides companies with high-level business and political intelligence on investment opportunities around the world. Hakluyt has been embroiled in several corporate spying scandals and was caught in 2001 paying a former German intelligence agent to infiltrate green groups in Europe on behalf of the Shell and BP oil companies. Sir Rod told The Age yesterday he had resigned from the Hakluyt advisory board “to remove any perception of future conflict of interest”.
