http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/sp...r/news-story/d15a8167e5fb1d2281e00ffd7c392c67
Parramatta Eels might not seek Jarryd Hayne comeback, says new club administrator
NICK TABAKOFF AND LEIGH VAN DEN BROEKE, The Daily Telegraph
15 minutes ago
MAX Donnelly, the man tasked with rescuing Parramatta from its current disasters, has expressed caution about the club’s interest in attracting Jarryd Hayne back to the Eels, as he also flagged radical changes to the club’s structure, including a separation of its two boards.
In an wide-ranging interview with The Daily Telegraph, Mr Donnelly — the man who led the chase for fugitive businessman Christopher Skase — has stressed he wants the Eels to become a western Sydney powerhouse once more, saying “the potential is there to build it into a club that’s financially sound, strong governance and winning football games, with strong management.”
In his first full day at the club’s HQ, after the club’s entire board was sacked on Tuesday, the new Parramatta administrator noted that “every club in the NRL would want Jarryd Hayne”.
But he offered no guarantees about Hayne’s recruitment to the Eels: “In an ideal world, yes. But I don’t know what room we have in the cap.”
But Brad Arthur can rest easy, with Mr Donnelly making a thinly-veiled reference to The Telegraph’s revelations last week that Arthur had complained about constant meddling by the Eels’ board: “I won’t be telling Brad who to play on the field.”
It is understood that Mr Donnelly met with NRL Integrity Unit boss Nick Weeks to discuss the club’s salary cap situation with the code.
Mr Donnelly also revealed there were huge problems with the structure which sees the Eels have an identical board of directors as its rich parent, the $82-million a year Parramatta Leagues Club.
“My instinct tells me that there has been no independence of the boards,” he said. “They all seem to think that it’s one pot of money, and they’re just grabbing money out of the Leagues Club. (But) they are two separate bodies, and my initial view is you need some operating from the Leagues Club’s perspective, and some from the football club perspective.”
He noted that one of his top priorities was “installing a proper board into that football club”.
It is known that a major focus of the NSW Police’s Strike Force Rhodium into Parramatta is the fact that money belonging to the Leagues Club and its members is being used for improper purposes, including under-the-table third party payments to players. The methods by which these payments were disguised included the faking of invoices.
Mr Donnelly said Leagues Club members were entitled to be “somewhat concerned” by the spending.
The Eels have by far the biggest losses of any club in the NRL, with its figure expected to head well north of $10 million for 2016, with Leagues Club members effectively left to foot the bill.
Mr Donnelly said that he had not yet been appointed to run the football club, but added: “I will be, and I’ll be taking advice on how to do that.”
He said he was aiming to be out of the club by the start of the 2017 NRL year. “You’d like to think it was the start of next season,” he said. “The immediate issue is to get the football club under control with effective management.”
Mr Donnelly will be meeting with the club’s solicitors tomorrow to ascertain if the club’s appeal against its NRL sanctions announced on Friday is still worth pursuing in court. He said he was trying to “understand the legal reasoning and the basis behind appealing its sanctions”.
“I don’t want to fund something unless I am comfortable funding it,” he said. “I could effectively stop it.”
He added that he was keen to end the club’s antagonistic relationship with the NRL, which has included an expensive Supreme Court battle over the code’s sanctions against the Eels. Mr Donnelly said the “last thing” he wanted was to have a difficult relationship with the NRL.
