We reported earlier this week that Labor’s David Feeney had got himself into yet another spot of bother over his spruiking of a $500,000 grant to the Maharishi School in Reservoir, a private school with fewer than 50 students that is currently under investigation. A tipster tells us that Feeney’s connection with the school actually goes way back:

“There’s a further twist to this. The Maharishi school was for years run out of the old Loyola seminary in Watsonia, owned by the Grollo family. Patriarch Bruno Grollo had become a keen follower of Maharishi yoga, and urged everyone to practice transcendental meditation. The Grollos gave generously to the Natural Law Party, an outfit which ran candidates in every lower house seat in the 1996 election (the Natural Law foundation is the holding body for the school). But the Grollos also had good relations with the union movement, and Labor – and one of the architects of Progressive Business for Labor, a donations-funnelling group established in the 1990s was … David Feeney.”