'Hokis,' said Berejiklian, using the couple's pet name for each other, an Armenian term of endearment meaning 'my beloved' and 'my soul'. 'Are you coming down on Sunday night or anything?'
On September 1, 2017, Premier Gladys Berejiklian was on the phone with her lover, Daryl Maguire, chatting away in the way intimate partners do, about nothing and anything."Hokis," said Berejiklian, using the couple's pet name for each other, an Armenian term of endearment meaning "my beloved" and "my soul".AdvertisementMaguire went on to relay his busy travel schedule - he had to go to Griffith, he said, and Canberra and then China.
Maguire was, as the Premier told the ICAC this week in excruciating evidence, the man with whom she was in a "close personal relationship".She told the inquiry their relationship with the father-of-two started in 2015, around the time of the election, and ended a few months ago. Maguire has variously said it started in 2013, 2014 or 2015 and was "on again off again".
The taped phone calls reveal a casual intimacy between the pair, with Maguire, an unsuccessful yet relentless deal-maker, wittering on about his business interests, and his dire financial situation.The inquiry heard the pair hoped to go public with their relationship after Maguire retired at the 2019 election.
The whiplash Berejiklian’s colleagues are feeling is replicated among voters, who, for the most part, have huge respect and admiration for their Premier, particularly because of her peerless leadership during the pandemic. Counsel assisting Scott Robertson said Icac should not be a “public trial as to the nature and extent of the relationship”, but that is precisely what commentators, colleagues and voters have been trying to ascertain this week.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian, flanked by her family, arrives at the Sofitel Wentworth in Sydney on election night 2019.Berejiklian's family background is well known - her parents, Krikor and Arsha, are of Armenian descent, part of the diaspora that followed the 1915 Armenian genocide, which claimed Berejiklian’s great-grandparents.
She moved into a flat in Willoughby that she had bought with money saved from her successful banking career. "He was always talking about big deals and they always seemed to fall through ... they always seemed quite fanciful to me," Berejiklian told the ICAC.
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