Labelled "Mooney's minutes", it has been in the possession of the NRL since April and the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority since February and forms an element of the continuing drugs in sport investigation.
The contents of it are simple in both subject and description but perhaps its most damning component is the timeline it apparently places on the events at the club during an 11-week window of 2011.
Present at the meeting called at Sharkies Leagues club at 8am on April 7, 2011, were sacked football manager Darren Mooney, sacked doctor David Givney, sacked physiotherapist Konrad Schultz, ex-Cronulla head trainer Trent Elkin and sports scientist Stephen Dank.
The meeting was called after Dr Givney had sent a strongly worded email to coach Shane Flanagan and Mooney 24 hours earlier, sounding the alarm about the regimen of injections at the club at the time.Essentially, Givney demanded it all stop. Sadly for the Shark, it didn't.
One of the lines from the email, revealed in The Daily Telegraph on May 14, reads: "We will get asked sooner or later and the last thing the Sharks need is another shit headline".
Dank was allowed to continue in a role at Cronulla for another seven weeks and, according to the final report compiled by Tricia Kavanagh that's now in the hands of ASADA, physiotherapist Schultz told Givney there was another round of injections administered after the April 7 meeting.And the players were allegedly told by ex-trainer Elkin "not to tell the doctor". On top of that, Mooney's notes state that there were to be no more tablets handed out.
Again, according to Kavanagh's chronology, tablets and creams of peptides were given out for the next seven weeks. Dank has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
At some point, are the Cronulla Sharks ever going to concede they failed in their duty of care to their playing roster and corporate governance?It appears not. Instead of trying to fix the problem, the new board has sought new legal advice from another QC seeking to reinstate the people who oversaw this disaster.
The smear campaign now coming out of Sharkies headquarters is that Kavanagh's investigation was little more than an ASADA witch hunt to produce a "Labor document".
Some at the Sharks are apparently even going as far as suggesting it's a waste of paper and inadmissible in an anti-doping violation hearing.Or as Sharks captain Paul Gallen put it on Triple M back in May: "At the end of the day it's Trish Kavanagh's version of events. Not one player was interviewed, Trent Elkin wasn't interviewed, Steve Dank (wasn't interviewed). She's come up with that conclusion herself."
Wrong. She's come up with that conclusion based on the interviews she conducted with the various sacked staff members Mooney, Schultz and Mark Noakes and the forensic audit Deloitte produced from the Sharks' computer system.
And that's exactly why the previous board opted to take such drastic action and wield the axe because of, as the then board said at the time, "serious management failures" .
"We make these decisions in the interest of our club going forward, in the interest of the game itself and the welfare of our playing group, which is uppermost in our minds," the then board said in March.
The issue for the new Sharks board, headed by ex-Olympic basketballer Damian Keogh, is that they swept to power amid a campaign pledging to do everything possible to re-instate the four sacked staff.
Interestingly, The Daily Telegraph has also been told the new board has discreetly made inquires about the more cooperative approach Essendon and the AFL has taken towards the ASADA investigation.
Maybe, just maybe, they are considering all the options available to the club.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/sp...ds-more-light-on/story-fni3g0bn-1226674531763
