Perth Voice Interactive

LISA SCAFFIDI told the CCC her Facebook posts and Twitter tweets during her travels amounted to “public disclosure”. Ms Scaffidi, whose Twitter feed is peppered with photos of her travels, did not declare contributions in the relevant year for her travel to:

TAIPEI in 2008 (with a contribution by the Taiwanese government);

SINGAPORE in 2010 (contribution by Perth convention centre);

SHANGHAI in 2010 (contribution by Foreign Affairs Department and Bureau of Shanghai World Expo Co-ordination);

NANJING in 2010 (contribution by Nanjing Municpal People’s Government Foreign Affairs Office);

KAGOSHIMA in 2011 (contribution by 31st Joint Conference on Medical Informatics);

DUBAI in 2012 (contribution by Informa Conferences Saudi Arabia);

NEW YORK in October 2013 (contribution by Bloomberg).

The CCC says “in respect of some of the travel where the third party disclosure was not declared, Mrs Scaffidi nominated what she described as ‘other public disclosure’. This included Facebook posts and Tweets”.

Ms Scaffidi said she wasn’t using social media at the time of the Beijing Olympics and conceded the media didn’t know of the trip until the story broke in 2009.

The commission said it considered whether this constant pattern of “extensive non-disclosure of third party contributions to travel illustrates a misunderstanding by Mrs Scaffidi as to her disclosure obligations relative to the Olympic hospitality package”.

“The commission’s assessment is that it is more probably than not that, having regard to all the material including her many contradictory statements, the failure to disclose was deliberate.”