The crusading club boss and his $1.7m side hustle

A club boss who has crusaded against the industry’s reliance on gambling revenue is being scrutinised by the regulator after the club awarded his private company a $1.7 million consulting contract.

West HQ paid R.J. Errington & Associates to provide goods and services to design, evaluate and develop a new hotel to be owned and operated by the club, its annual report reveals.

Corporate filings indicate the club’s chief executive, Richard Errington, and his wife, Melinda, are the sole directors and shareholders of R.J. Errington & Associates.

Registered clubs are prohibited from entering into contracts with top executives’ companies, with a maximum penalty of $11,000, unless the contract has been approved by the board.

West HQ’s board disclosed in its annual report as a “key management personnel transaction” that Errington owned and operated R.J. Errington & Associates, which provided goods and services in relation to the new hotel valued at $1,681,145.

Liquor and Gaming NSW said it was aware of the matter and was making enquiries with the club.

Errington declined to answer questions but confirmed they had been received. The board also declined to comment.

The revelations come amid a building boom in the club industry, as venues try to diversify away from gambling, which accounts for up to 92 per cent of their revenue. This includes the construction of apartments, hotels, shopping plazas, retirement homes, childcare centres, restaurants and gyms.

Errington, who lives 750 kilometres north of the Rooty Hill-based West HQ in a beachfront apartment on the Gold Coast, has been vocal about the need to drive new forms of income.

In 2023, he quit the industry lobby group ClubsNSW in protest against the way it pegged its membership fees to gambling profits, declaring clubs that are over-reliant on gambling revenue are not serving their communities.

He has overseen the construction of a Novotel hotel, a 2000-seat theatre and a 4000-square-metre gymnastics and aquatic centre since he was appointed chief executive in 2006. He said in 2017 the revenue generated by the theatre would enable the club to dilute its reliance on gambling machine revenue to 50 per cent.

However, Herald analysis of gaming machine data suggests the club still draws more than half of its revenue from poker machines.

The Herald estimates about $70 million in revenue comes from gambling machines, based on taxes paid at a rate of 26.5 per cent during the three months to March 2026.

The figure can also be triangulated on the basis that West HQ owns about one-third of all the poker machines in clubs across the Blacktown local government area, and Blacktown punters gave up $52,903,133 in net profit to 2089 machines in the third quarter of 2025. Based on their machine numbers, West HQ would have pulled a net profit of $17,904,504 in that quarter, which can be extrapolated to $71 million for the year.

Errington’s regular salary is not clear from the annual report. Most clubs list their top executives and their combined salary bill, but West HQ only discloses that the key management personnel remuneration is $3.1 million. It does not say how many individuals share that figure.

The financial arrangements at West HQ are not the only interesting transactions that relate to building works in the clubs’ recently published annual reports.

Cabravale Resort (formerly Cabra-Vale Diggers) disclosed that the builder of a new hotel and club extension had been contracted to deliver the project on a cost-plus basis, which the Herald has confirmed with four other club CEOs is a highly unusual arrangement for a development of that size.

The builder, Wardan Group, is little known in an industry that tends to use the same specialist builders for their construction projects. Its website lists just four previous developments, all of them residential.

The value of the Cabravale Resort project was estimated at $116.5 million when council approved the plans in 2017, but a comparison of annual reports shows the budget has increased by about $30 million in each of the past two years and is projected to cost $230 million. It is also running behind schedule.

Cabravale Resort draws more than 90 per cent of its revenue from poker machines. Its management declined to say why it pursued a cost-plus arrangement due to commercial-in-confidence considerations.

Wardan Group’s chief executive, Rony Wardan, is also building a hotel for a Cabravale Resort’s subsidiary, the Campbelltown RSL, as one of the directors of a different construction company, Bell Property, on a fixed $65.9 million contract.

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