Marinus Link deal signed with the Commonwealth

The Marinus Link deal is going ahead after Tasmania signed an agreement with the Commonwealth, Energy Minister Nick Duigan has revealed.

Th project has been marred recently by concerns around a lack of transparency after Labor, the Greens and the Crossbench were only briefed on the Marinus Link business case earlier this week.

Labor Leader Dean Winter said that he had been given no real chance to assess the business case of more than 1000 pages after Premier Jeremy Rockliff demanded the party sign off on the deal by 9am today.

But on Friday morning Mr Duigan said the deal with the federal government had been signed off on Thursday night and that the agreement was significantly better than the previous one.

“It includes a grant of some $346 million GST free for the North West Transmission Development,” he said.

“It also includes capping Tasmania's equity position at $103.5 million, which has already been committed, so Tasmania will pay no more equity into Marinus Link.

“We'll continue to have a position on the board and we will maintain our reserve rights on various matters that are important to the state, so that's a key consideration.

“And there are a number of other things that we have also secured in terms of another $650 million potentially of concessional finance for Tarraleah should that project go ahead, taking that number up to $1.3 billion and some other concessions as well.”

The business case was expected to be released on July 1 but Mr Duigan said that could not happen because the government was in caretaker mode due to the state election.

“I think in a perfect world, it's important to recognise that these negotiations with the Commonwealth have been going on for months, and the original timeline would have had us signing a new shareholders agreement and a new FFA agreement prior to the 1st of July, at which point we had hoped to share the whole estate business case publicly.

“That didn't occur, so these negotiations continued.

“Then you've got the election being called, which obviously adds complication to that, but the necessity to continue to negotiate with the Commonwealth and protect Tasmania's position was the most important thing.”