UPDATED - SATURDAY 31 January 2014.

Here is an extract from June 2013 statement made by Nicholas Jukes, former Thiess general manager, to Victoria Police about his involvement in The AWU Scandal.

Thiess and the AWU WA Branch were involved in at least one industrial dispute in the WA Industrial Relations Commission in the months leading up to the first AWU WRA cheque being paid to Wilson.

I have spent some hours with the state archives office and the archivists and registrar of the WA Industrial Relations Commission to get to the bottom of the dispute.

The bottom line at present is that the parties to the dispute - Thiess and the AWU WA Branch sought and received an order that the court files be sealed for 25 years and that the contents of the file be kept secret.

Note that the company name Thiess is misspelt in the state records office files making it more difficult to search.

Here is the SRO extract.

And here is the finalisation of the matter, note the dates.

The Thiess managers, Joe Trio and Nick Jukes deny that the agreement with Wilson was about buying industrial peace - here they are in The Australian dated 22 December 2012.

We put $300,000 in AWU slush fund, says Bruce Wilson's brother-in-law Joe Trio

The Weekend Australian can reveal that Thiess never checked that the  AWU Workplace Reform Association - to which the company forwarded  monthly cheques for more than two years - was a legitimate body.

When the fraud came to light in 1995, Mr Trio and his boss at Thiess,  Nick Jukes, refused direct requests from the West Australian Fraud  Squad and the AWU to press charges against Mr Wilson and Mr Blewitt.

Mr Trio and Mr Jukes, who is now the chief executive of ASX-listed  mining services company Sedgman in Brisbane, told police that they did  not wish to press charges because the union had, in fact, provided all  the training services that Thiess had paid for.

But questions remain over why Thiess needed to pay $100,000 a year to  the AWU to encourage its workers on the Dawesville Cut project, 80km  south of Perth, to undergo skills training.

Former AWU state secretary Tim Daly, who blew the whistle on the  fraud, claims the Thiess payments were designed to "buy industrial  peace" on a project at a time that construction companies in WA were  experiencing difficulties in dealings with unions.

He says the AWU provided nothing at the Dawesville Cut that the union would not have provided on a major construction project.

Mr Trio denies the deal was done to buy industrial peace. "This was  money paid to the AWU to have their co-operation in training," he says.  "In those days, unless you had the union behind everything that you did,  it was very, very difficult - strikes, intimidation, all of the  nonsense that went on in those days.

"I guess the guys over east thought 'Maybe if we get these (union) guys on side, our training program will run a lot smoother'."

Mr Daly, of the AWU, recalls that in the mid-1990s he phoned Mr  Jukes, who was based in Brisbane with Thiess, and told him that the WA  Director of Public Prosecutions needed Thiess to press charges if the  matter was to be prosecuted. "I said to him I wanted to send those two  crooks (Wilson and Blewitt) to jail," Mr Daly says.

"But he said to me: 'I'm not complaining, I got what I paid for.' "

In an interview with The Weekend Australian, Mr Jukes says Thiess had  believed its payments were going directly to the AWU and the company  co-operated with the WA fraud squad investigation, handing over all  paperwork related to the 1992 agreement. "They said to us, 'You guys  need to press charges'," he says.

"We said that we hadn't been defrauded; we were given the service by  the AWU, and if this money has gone off to an account that isn't a  legitimate AWU account, this is an issue between the AWU and its  management, not an issue with Thiess.

"They intimated that if Thiess didn't press charges, it would be very hard for them to prosecute.

"We said we didn't understand the logic of pressing charges if we got the service we paid for."

Mr Jukes concedes it is very unlikely anyone at Thiess checked the  legitimacy of the AWU Workplace Reform Association before writing  cheques to it.

It is believed the association had not even been incorporated by the  WA Commissioner for Corporate Affairs at the time the first Thiess  payments were made in early 1992.

Mr Jukes says he had no reason to suspect Mr Wilson may have been  deceptive and he believed all along that the AWU Workplace Reform  Association was a legitimate AWU body. He also rejects claims that the  payments were aimed at buying industrial peace on the project, which was  completed ahead of time and on budget without any industrial action.

He says he feels sorry for Mr Trio, who has been subject to  allegations he was complicit in Wilson's fraud. "Joe's fingerprints  aren't on this at all," he says.

"If anybody's are on it, I did the deal and the HR people in Thiess did the deal, not Joe."

Mr Trio says he married Mr Wilson's sister while Mr Wilson was still  in high school. When Mr Trio returned to Perth from the US to work for  Thiess in the early 90s, he says he "discovered" that Mr Wilson had  become an official with the AWU.

He had "very little involvement" with Mr Wilson during the Dawesville  Cut project because the union boss was transferred to Melbourne with  the AWU.

But Mr Trio did have plenty of dealings with Mr Blewitt, Mr Wilson's key ally, who has since admitted his part in the fraud.

He believes Mr Blewitt and other "union thugs" are behind many of the allegations that have circulated against him.

The WA fraud squad declined to comment on its investigation.