A senior Labor official listened to and made copies of the files on a journalist's misplaced dictaphone but Victorian Opposition Leader Daniel Andrews is adamant his office did not distribute one of the recordings.
Victorian Labor assistant secretary Kosmos Samaras has admitted he was handed the recording device left behind at the party's state conference in May, and that he made copies of all of its files "for the purpose of listening to it".
He said he sought legal advice on whether he could do anything with the digital audio files, and then decided against it.
The dictaphone, files and all copies were then destroyed and Labor has no explanation for how one of the politically charged recordings came to be emailed to hundreds of Liberal Party members.
"They deleted it, they destroyed the files; how it was leaked to the Liberal Party and distributed to other Liberals I do not know," Mr Andrews told Fairfax Radio on Monday.
"Nobody in my office had any involvement in the distribution of this material."
Mr Andrews said the files included recordings of off-the-record conversations with a number of coalition and Labor figures, including Mr Samaras.
He said Mr Samaras reacted angrily on hearing his conversation had been covertly recorded, and he erred by not returning the device to the Fairfax journalist who owned it.
The coalition government called for an investigation and said the relevant computers and USB sticks should be handed over to police.
"Mr Andrews said he would take full responsibility for this - he had taken none," Planning Minister Matthew Guy said.
"He's running a protection racket for those in his own office, including his state secretary, who he knows has done the wrong thing."
The Age editor-in-chief Andrew Holden said the dictaphone was clearly marked as a Fairfax-owned device, and no one from Labor contacted the newspaper before it was destroyed.
"I'm not sure whether to send them an invoice for a new one," Mr Holden told Fairfax Radio.
The recording emailed to Liberal members was an off-the-record conversation in which former Victorian premier Ted Baillieu criticised his colleagues and referred to independent MP Geoff Shaw, upper house Liberal MP Bernie Finn and his "crazy mates", and federal government minister Kevin Andrews.
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