THE Parramatta Eels’ current head of football, Daniel Anderson, is at the centre of new *evidence the club guaranteed hundreds of thousands of dollars of third-party payments to star players including club captain Tim Mannah and gun winger Semi Radradra, in breach of NRL salary cap rules.
Confidential Eels emails obtained by The Daily Telegraph also show Anderson was in active discussions with Eels chairman Steve Sharp and deputy chairman Tom Issa about solving the club’s salary cap problems by “obtaining TPA (third party agreement) support for any newly acquired or extended contract negotiations”.
Another email gives an intriguing insight into the key role of TPAs in some players’ total packages at the Eels. It shows that on February 20, 2014, Anderson personally prepared Issa for the negotiation of Mannah’s contract until the end of the 2017 season.
The email begins: “Tom, For your discussion (concerning *Mannah’s contract)” — and goes on to outline a package to be offered that incorporates $225,000 of TPA payments, or $75,000 a year. This component forms an integral part of Mannah’s proposed three-year deal — with the TPAs apparently intrinsic to the contract. The payments beef up Mannah’s contract to “a total package worth $1,285,000 over three years”.
Five days later Anderson sent another email to club officials outlining a beefed-up package for NSW Origin player Mannah worth $1.32 million, or $35,000 more than the initial offer, over three years — again, incorporating a guaranteed $225,000 in TPAs over the period. This appears to follow the negotiations with Mannah’s representatives.
In another email to Anderson dated May 20, 2014, the contract of Eels star Semi Radradra, one of the NRL’s form players, is discussed. A representative of *Radradra tells Anderson what he needs “to get this deal done”. He requests “an additional $35K TPA” for the remainder of 2014, adding Radradra “needs this cash urgently to send back home (to Fiji) for a family issue”.
The email suggests Radradra be paid $1.375 million over four years to 2018, plus the $35,000 TPA for 2014, “to close this deal out”.
Meanwhile, on March 17, 2014, Anderson sent another email, this time addressed to both Issa and Sharp, outlining the club’s dire salary cap situation for 2015 and the role of TPAs in solving it.
Anderson notes in the email that, because of its salary cap problems, the club has “not *catered” for a number of its *players, including Vai Toutai, Willie Tonga, Joseph Paulo, Ben Smith and Ken Sio.
Parramatta Eels Tim Mannah and Semi Radradra (with Luke Kelly).
He suggests offloading players such as “Chris Sandow, Mitchell Allgood, Brenden Santi, Ryan Morgan”, and offering “TPA support” for “any newly acquired or extended contract negotiations”.
This appears to contradict the NRL’s salary cap rules, which require TPAs to be at “arm’s length”, and not to be organised as part of contract negotiations with the club.
In recent weeks The Telegraph has revealed a raft of internal documents that point to a systemic culture of using TPAs to flout NRL salary cap rules. Anderson concludes in his email: “Bottom line is we are not healthy …. another issue is our dumped contracts (Cheyse Blair and Jake Mullaney) already *occupy 140k in (the) 2nd tier *(salary cap) next year”.
In his Feb 20 email Anderson talks of offering Sandow a termination settlement, in the context of Eels salary cap issues. “We would have to allow for approximately 120k to be placed in 2015 Salary Cap.”
There is no suggestion that any of the players mentioned in this article have done anything wrong.
All of the emails in this story are from 2014, the year after Eels chairman Sharp and deputy chairman Issa took office. Recently, Sharp has defended the current Eels board’s track record, claiming that many of its problems have come from past administrations: “What’s different about the Eels these days is that we have better processes in place and an utter determination to improve our head office,” he said last month
