Headstone at Rookwood Cemetery, Sydney Credit:Steven Siewert For instance, the price of a double funeral space for a Jewish burial rose to $17,050 last September but was reduced following outcry to $13,500 on the November price list. Chinese burials are also expensive: A burial with a monument costs around $41,148. On Wednesday night the Minister for Primary Industries, Niall Blair, said Mr Wilson had resigned and an interim administrator would be appointed. The board had been plagued by disharmony, said those close to Rookwood. Sources said many of the trust's senior managers had also left recently. Two board members resigned last year, the deputy chair Patricia Lloyd resigned earlier this week , and board member and florist Robyn Hawes stepped down on Wednesday.

The remaining two board members, architect Richard Seidman and business owner Ahmad Kamaledine, were told by Mr Blair that the board could no longer be legally constituted - because it no longer had a quorum - and would be dissolved. Mr Blair's decision followed an investigation by the Cemeteries and Crematoria NSW, which oversees cemetery operators in NSW. He said the final report, which has not been made public, was provided to the trust's board last month. "Following concerns raised with me, I directed that an independent investigation be conducted into the Rookwood General Cemeteries Reserve Trust (RGCRT), which has responsibility for Rookwood General Cemetery," he said. Rookwood's new general board and trust was the flagship of 2013 reforms by the NSW government to modernise the state's cemeteries, and address the lack of burial space in the future. It incorporated five denominational trusts, including Anglican, Jewish and Muslim faiths, with the exception of Catholics. It was charged with improving the management of Rookwood, which has been been the subject of previous inquiries over the years into its management. The reforms and the creation of the CCA, which investigated the current complaints, would ensure that no faith was disadvantaged, promised the then minister Katrina Hodgkinson who said they would also address systemic management and governance problems in cemetery management.

NSW Jewish Board of Deputies CEO Vic Alhadeff said the community would "continue to support the government's efforts to improve operations and the delivery of services at Rookwood. As we have not yet seen the outcome of the government inquiry, we cannot comment further at this stage." Earlier this year David Knoll from the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies told the ABC that he was concerned that different faiths were being charged differently burials. "For example some graves can have one person buried in them. Some can have a married couple buried in them," Mr Knoll said. "The level of discount when you bury a married couple in a single grave is different depending on which faith community you come from. We don't understand the basis for that." At that time, the president of the Lebanese Muslim Association Samier Dandan told ABC that Rookwood had become more corporatised and was spending money on marketing rather than providing proper services to the community.

An industry source said on Thursday there was a lack of transparency around prices at the cemetery. For instance, an in-ground coffin interment with a monument was quoted as a package, using Rookwood's stonemasons, making it difficult for consumers to use outside stone masons. A funeral director said the trust had gone "too far" in commercialising the cemetery, and had overlooked its responsibility to the public as a user of Crown Land. "A lot of good people, and some bad, lost their jobs, and now we've ended up with a bigger organisation that is poorly managed, and no better," said a funeral director who dealt frequently with Rookwood. Under chairman Bob Wilson, the newly constituted trust was involved in investigating previous allegations of mismanagement. "We're dealing with bereaved people's money," he said then. "We have to be accountable for it and we have to be careful about it." Leo McLeay, the chair of the Catholic Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust which operates some of Rookwood, said the general trust had faced a lot of difficult historical issues. "There was obvious unhappiness in the end at board level and among stakeholders, which culminated in the inquiry. It wouldn't have been an easy job to make it work."

Rookwood's managers and former board members did not respond to a request for comment.