There has been opposition to more coal seam gas wells in Gloucester. There have been fresh indications the company was in potential breach of disclosure obligations. An opponent of the coal seam gas wells, Groundswell Gloucester, said the AGL review increased the urgency for the government to investigate the disclosure of donations following last week’s approval for the company to begin conducting fracking of wells near homes in Gloucester. AGL's acknowledgement it may have erred in its political donation disclosures "reinforces Groundswell’s call for a total halt of all AGL activities in Gloucester until there’s a full inquiry", John Watts, a spokesman for the group, said. It also "confirms the fears we’d had that they’d adopted a laissez-faire approach to keeping the government and the community informed about the level of their political donations", Mr Watts said.

Last week, the Environmental Defenders Office NSW wrote to the government outlining potential breaches in AGL’s political donations for the period 2008-2011. For now, the NSW Planning Department is maintaining its earlier response that it "will respond to the EDO’s letter in due course", a spokeswoman said on Tuesday. The involvement of Deloitte "is a good, prudent and diligent response", EDO principal solicitor Sue Higginson said. "However, it is a regulatory matter and, therefore, there should be an investigation [by the department]." Donations

AGL has said it was under "no statutory obligation" to lodge a political donations statement along with its Part 3A major project application for the Gloucester gas project. Despite that claim, the company disclosed on May 13, 2010, four donations totalling $48,250 – split roughly evenly between Labor and the Liberals in NSW. Although AGL listed in that disclosure two donations of $11,000 each – in 2009 and 2010 – to now-discredited Liberals networking group Millennium Forum, it omitted a third donation of $11,000, made in 2008. By the time its Gloucester gas project had been approved, on February 2011, it had donated a further $39,300, details of which do not appear to be on any Planning Department website. In a disclosure this July, AGL revealed it had made a further $49,000 in political donations between June 22, 2012, and June 23 this year – all of which went to either the Liberals or Nationals in NSW.

It has said $33,000 of that total went to the Millennium Forum and was intended for federal use, as was a $5000 donation to the NSW Liberal Party's federal campaign in August last year. Other donations include $2500 for a "Barry O’Farrell event" with the then premier in early March this year, and $5250 for an event with NSW Nationals leader and Deputy Premier Andrew Stoner. Parliamentary call Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham cited the AGL donations issue while introducing a notice of motion covering political donations and planning approval to the NSW Parliament on Tuesday. He plans to move a motion on the next sitting day for the government to "conduct an open and transparent investigation into compliance with donations declarations and their impact of any political donations in the planning approval process".

The motion also calls for a ban on donations from mining and petroleum companies, and a freezing of the approval for AGL's Gloucester gas project "pending the outcomes of this investigation". "The requirement to declare political donations was implemented as an anti-corruption measure," Mr Buckingham said, adding that other companies such as Whitehaven/Aston Coal had recently been prosecuted for donation disclosure failures. "AGL should reveal exactly why they made these political donations," he said. "Was it to curry favour with these political parties?" Application triggers EDO’s Ms Higginson said that, importantly, AGL’s claim that it was not required to make timely and complete disclosures to the NSW Planning Department appeared to be wrong.

The apparent breaches stem from the fact that AGL's Part 3A major project was modified for a gas pipeline realignment application lodged by the company with the NSW government on November 18 last year. "From all of the applications, including the AGL modification application, there appear to be regulatory inconsistencies and omissions in relation to the regulatory requirements to disclose," Ms Higginson said. Fairfax Media has sought confirmation from the Planning Department about the implications to AGL that were triggered by the modification to its project. These requirements would appear to include AGL disclosing the full list of political donations for the previous two years at the time of its application last November. Every subsequent donation – of which there were five – should then have been disclosed within seven days to the Planning Department, according to the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979, the EDO said.