Matthew Guy answers questions last week about his dinner with alleged Mafia boss Tony Madafferi. Credit:AAP Afterwards, the market gardeners offer a "swag" of money, but not directly to Guy, according to Macmillan, a party official. He wants to keep the future premier's hands clean (enough), so he does the dirty work himself at arm's length. It's called "plausible deniability". If Guy has to stand up later he can legitimately say he knows nothing. To further obscure it, Macmillan suggests dividing the cash up in lots of smaller than $13,200 each. That way, hundreds of thousands of dollars can be donated without having to disclose it to the public, who will be none the wiser. The threshold is that high because John Howard changed it - the man whom one of the market gardeners involved, Frank Lamattina, says "used to keep all his promises".

Tony Madafferi at the Coroners Court in 1993 during a hearing into the murder of Alfonso Murartore, a Melbourne green grocer. Credit:William West But let's pause a moment at the dinner. There, the group raised the question of the fruit and vegetable market. "They hate the management [at the new Epping wholesale market], they don't like the general manager and the people who run it," Macmillan said later. Antonio Madafferi is a a wealthy grocer and part owner of the La Porchetta pizza chain. Credit:Jason South "It was originally run by a committee of market gardeners".

Guy's spokesman said these were legitimate "public policy issues", his Calabrian dinner companions "some of the biggest users of the market", and the discussion related to "cost of living impacts on consumers". But the market is also believed by police, traditionally, to be the epicentre of mafia power in Victoria. In a statement to police in 1992, Tony Madafferi said: "I am a man who is very respected at the market." Madafferi has never been charged with any offence, and denies any wrongdoing. But this is the same market that fruit and vegetable tycoon Frank Costa described in 2015 as "rotten to the core"; where the wiseguys would bribe or threaten the buyers from the big supermarkets to deal with them exclusively then levy a 50c tariff on every box of fruit or vegetables sold through Coles and Woolworths. Talk about cost to consumers.

We, the public, do not often get to see the machinery behind the grubby business of political donations, and the politicians on all sides like it that way. When caught, they twist and turn. With Guy, it's a case of increasingly implausible deniability. First he claimed he was never told that Madafferi would be at the dinner. When evidence started emerging, he admitted his office was told about it, but it was not passed on to him because nobody recognised the name "Antonio" (as opposed to "Tony") Madafferi. Hmmm. Guy's people started off saying 25 were at the dinner. That's not a dinner, it's a function. Then he revised it down. And down again. The truth is, this was a small dinner held, in the words of Barrie Macmillan, who was there, at "a private table" at the back of the Lobster Cave restaurant. Macmillan says seven were at that table, four Calabrians and three Liberals.

Then Guy said he knew nothing about any donations. It seems no money was actually paid apart from the restaurant bill itself (lobster and Grange). But a discussion about donations, between intermediaries and the Liberal party, began shortly afterwards. According to Macmillan, Guy's office would have been kept informed, though the decision was made: "don't associate Matthew directly with a paper bag full of money". We have to ask what the Calabrians would have hoped for in return for all that cash? A reasonable guess would be a change in the hated management at the market, to make it more friendly to their interests. Then comes the biggest furphy of all, Guy's referral to the state's anti-corruption commission. This is the same commission whose powers the Coalition government so weakened that it could only begin an investigation if it had hard evidence of "serious corrupt conduct" leading to an indictable offence. The donation, disclosure and anti-corruption laws in Victoria are so pathetically weak that, even if a donation had been made, no law would have been broken. So IBAC cannot investigate. Both sides of politics have arranged things this way, and stubbornly maintain it, because it suits their financial interests.

Guy's showy self-referral is window dressing, nothing more. It's a way of papering over his own actions and avoiding sticky questions for the time being. Loading Guy has admitted that dining with Tony Madafferi was an error of judgment. It was. A shocking one. And it's for that he should be judged.