Tony Shepherd, one of the key business advisers to the Abbott and Baird governments, was one of a group of ''big wigs'' trying to drive up traffic forecasts on the ill-fated Lane Cove Tunnel project, the Supreme Court has heard.
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Mr Shepherd now chairs the WestConnex Delivery Authority, the organisation in charge of building the biggest motorway project in the country's history, and was the head of the Prime Minister's National Commission of Audit.
But in a former role as an executive at Transfield Holdings, Mr Shepherd ran the consortium that won the right in 2003 to build the Lane Cove Tunnel – a project now the subject of a $144 million legal battle between one of its investors and traffic forecasters.
According to documents read into court by counsel for AMP, the manager of two funds that lost money on the project, Mr Shepherd was one of several executives on the project in late 2002 trying to make the traffic figures more optimistic.
''I feel another loss coming on,'' Mr Shepherd was quoted as writing to a colleague in late 2002, just months after Transfield had lost a separate bid to win the rights to build the M7 motorway through western Sydney.
According to AMP, which is suing forecasters Parsons Brinckerhoff and Booz Allen Hamilton for $144 million, one of the ways Mr Shepherd's consortium avoided ''another loss'' was by inflating the number of motorists they said would drive through the tunnel.
In notes of a meeting she took with ''big wigs'' working on the consortium, one of the forecasters for Parsons Brinckerhoff, Gillian Akers, recorded the pressure they were applying to ''pump up the base'' forecasts for the tunnel.
Ms Akers recorded Ray Wilson, working for construction company Thiess, as saying they needed to ''get the traffic high then get the banks to build it''.
Mr Shepherd, meanwhile, was ''very upset by lack of growth 2006-2011'' and wanted to ''get to the bottom of it'', according to Ms Akers' notes.
''What else can we do to the network to get more traffic on the network into the tunnel?'' AMP's counsel Tony Bannon quoted the meeting notes as saying.
The consortium had an incentive to push up traffic forecasts for the Lane Cove Tunnel to lure investors, and also to be able to promise a large payment to the state government.
The promise of this payment would help the consortium win the bid to build the tunnel, which opened in 2007 with traffic figures drastically below forecast.
In another email quoted in front of Supreme Court Judge Michael Pembroke on Tuesday, Mr Shepherd wrote to consortium members that ''at a minimum'' they should try to sell investors on the basis of the upside, or more optimistic, forecasts.
Ms Akers and Parsons Brinckerhoff did manage to increase the traffic forecasts, despite several warnings by another employee, Raymond Golzar.
One of the ways they did so was by discarding modelling they had earlier performed for periods out of peak hour.
Instead, Parsons Brinckerhoff used only modelling results for the morning and afternoon peak hours, and applied an ''expansion factor'' to project how many cars would use the road in off-peak periods.
But according to a file note of a conversation read by Mr Bannon, when an AMP executive asked Ms Akers about modelling off-peak times, he was told the ''middle of the day not modelled''.
Parsons Brinckerhoff received a $333,000 success fee for working on the project.
ABN Amro, the investment bank working on the project, and Transfield sold their investments in the Lane Cove Tunnel before it opened. The tunnel entered receivership in 2010 and was bought out by Transurban.
The trial continues.
