---

This is a story that could have come straight from the pages of the US literary superstar Jonathan Franzen.It involves an Australian sporting legend, a dead and overlooked Australian author and Franzen himself. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has weighed into a stoush in Watsons Bay in which residents are fighting plans by the Socceroo goalkeeper Mark Schwarzer for his 1880s harbourfront house Boongarre, also known as the Stead House 14 Pacific Street was the childhood home of the author Christina Stead

IT was a two-year fight between a property developer and a Hollywood director over a timber deck and two palm trees at a $28 million home on one of Sydney's most prized beachfronts. In one corner was Mad Max director George Miller; in the other real estate guru and former commodities trader Vaughan Blank George Miller versus Vaughan Blank: War on the Sydney waterfront

---

Payback might be a bitch, but the urge for revenge, rooted in biology, is universal, as well as the stuff of great drama...

Primo Levi has been placed in a box labeled “Holocaust writer,” but his humanism and moral clarity resonate everywhere people are not free... Here There Is a Why: Primo Levi, Humanist

Winners, losers - and revenge The stuff of Bohemian Drama
Forgive everybody everything. So say the self-help gurus. Maybe they’re right. But should forgiveness be reduced to something passive and empty, a sanctimonious way of simply moving on?

In his grand and gloomy book Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud identified the tenacious sense of guilt as “the most important problem in the development of civilization.” In fact, he continued, it seems that “the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.” Such guilt made for an elusive quarry, however. It was hard to identify and hard to understand, and even harder to counteract, since it so frequently dwelled at an unconscious level and could easily be mistaken for something else.

• The Moral Economy of Guilt [On the plains of New Mexico, a band of elite marathoners tests a controversial theory of evolution: that humans can outrun the fastest animals on earth.Forgive everybody everything. So say the self-help gurus. Maybe they’re right. But should forgiveness be reduced to something passive and empty, a sanctimonious way of simply moving on? Fair Chase - new explanation of how humans became hunters; Music hits the brain like sex. So can neuroscience distinguish between hearing an organ played and having one’s organs played with?Striking a False Note ; Every year, Washington swells with 20,000 interns. They fetch coffee, drive down wages, and add yet another sexual frisson to the halls of power]
• · · Bernard-Henri Lévy, moral philosopher and vain gadfly, has taken many admirable stands--on Communism, Bosnia, Darfur. So why is this well-coiffed adventure seeker so hated The Strenuous Life ; World War II revisionism – Churchill as war criminal, Allied bombers as terrorists – is often crude, but not without value. It adds complexity to our view of the past. Adam Kirsch explains... Is World War II Still ‘the Good War’?
• · · · We are known by the trail of 0’s and 1’s we leave in our wake. Who owns that information? Is sharing it – creating a data commons – a civic duty?; Harvard has lost faith in itself. Tradition has been abandoned, says Harvey Mansfield, and all that remains is prestige. Harvard will hold on to that, because somehow it can be used to deflate its pretensions
• · · · · At MIT, everyone is eccentric – and it certainly pays. Alumni have founded 25,800 companies, which generate revenues of about $1.9 trillion...; Literature and law. At the Supreme Court, Hemingway and Wittgenstein loom large. Not so the scribblings of legal scholars, which are of no use and no interest to Chief Justice Roberts... Keep the Briefs Brief, Literary Justices Advise
• · · · · · To some, the tension between security and privacy melts away with a simple retort: “I’ve got nothing to hide.” But it isn’t true. Even upstanding Arts & Letters Daily readers have things to conceal.. Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide' ; Word processors were going to liberate us from paperwork: “Machines should work, people should think.” But neither ideal is often enough the case. Now what?.. Paperwork Explosion
• · · · · · Veteran journalist Stuart Washington Google Australia's real strength is in services, not sales; Light-footed Google in $4.6bn tax dodge ;BusinessDay's Stuart Washington yesterday won the $5000 Australian Council of Superannuation Investors media award for his coverage of the collapse of the Albury fund manager Trio Capital, in which investors lost $125 million. He gave this acceptance speech at the award ceremony. Using elaborate corporate structures in exotic Caribbean tax havens, Astarra Strategic spirited away about $125 million, with ASIC eventually finding a lawyer based in Hong Kong, Jack Flader, playing an instrumental role. Astarra Strategic spirited away about $125 million

---

People with a scarcity mentality tend to see everything in terms of win-lose. There is only so much; and if someone else has it, that means there will be less for me. The more principle-centered we become, the more we develop an abundance mentality, the more we are genuinely happy for the successes, well-being, achievements, recognition, and good fortune of other people. We believe their success adds to...rather than detracts from... our lives.
-Stephen R. Covey on recognition

The rewards go to the risk-takers, those who are willing to put their egos on the line and reach out to other people and to a richer, fuller life for themselves.
-Susan RoAne

---

From the School of Working Life I've often said there a few things more insulting than false modesty and Media Dragon I have no intention of insulting you with it ;-)
-There’s so many sides to Media Dragon, we are round

US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously opined that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Yet even the liberal democracies have claimed that sometimes they require a place in the shade – condemning Wikileaks for publishing their confidential information. Many people are convinced that Wikileaks is a force for good; others condemn it as being equivalent to a terrorist organisation that detonates explosive information rather than bombs. Are governments justified in their condemnation of Wikileaks and merely being responsible in protecting their secrets? Could the world really survive an unbridled commitment to transparency?
For: Professor Stuart Rees
Against: Alexander Downer
-Thursday 16 June 2011 Wikileaks is a force for good City Recital Hall Angel Place

Silver Screen L&C/C&L: Cover to Cover After the Prague Spring
To make progress, you have to make a mess
-Peggy Lee (quoted in George Simon, "Hooray for Love!," Metronome, December 1948)

If one simply wants to make a living by putting words on paper, then the BBC, the film companies and the like are reasonably helpful. But if one wants to be primarily a writer, then, in our society, one is an animal that is tolerated but not encouraged--something rather like a house sparrow--and one gets on better if one realises one's position from the start.
-George Orwell, "The Cost of Letters" (Horizon, September 1946)

When you’re in a consumer society, one of the ways to make yourself feel better is to spend. When that doesn’t feel right any more, or isn’t possible, you look for other outlets. It’s not just about mental wellbeing or self-help; it’s about cultivating your mind — but without being snobby or pretentious. The most popular talks, she concedes, are always on the topics of love and work, but the approach is anything but Bridget Jonesy. A recent workshop may have been titled “How necessary is a relationship?”, but the conversation took in the poet David Whyte and the psychologist Anthony Storr’s book Solitude.

• Living Well [The School of Life has been described as a Chemist for the mind ; “The rose,” says Umberto Eco, “is so rich in meanings that it hardly has any meaning left.” Not so. The bloom remains potent with symbolism The tale of the rose]
• · Travel can be madly exasperating, especially if you write for a living. One of the reasons why Mrs. T and I tend to gravitate to familiar lodgings when on the road is that, like most writers, I prefer to work in familiar surroundings. From ocean to ocean, forever ; Forgive everybody everything. So say the self-help gurus. Maybe they’re right. But should forgiveness be reduced to something passive and empty, a sanctimonious way of simply moving on? The Moral Economy of Guilt
• · · The mixed fortunes of Prague's 'European Hollywood' What began as the joint dream of two Prague brothers has become one of the most important centers of filmmaking in Europe: Barrandov Studios Barrandov Studios at 80 ; “The average international gross per Pixar film is more than $550 million” according to the new article in Wired this month. I am a huge fan of Pixar films, and find the emotion that is baked into their animated films breath-taking. One of the secrets of Pixar’s blockbuster success ; Often spot-on, sometimes creepy, David Thomson’s masterwork is the most influential book ever written about the movies—and the most infuriating. My Villawood Love Story ; Drama on Sydney Harbour Bridge and Lockdown
• · · · Jupiter lined up with Venus, Mercury and Mars in a celestial dance early in the morning Down Under. The alignment of the four planets happens only once every 50-100 years, and very rarely on Friday the 13th. The planets align over Sydney; "There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say." Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave Planets cluster for once-in-a-lifetime viewing; Sunday, May 22, 2011 is going to be a very bad day for people who are not good Christians, because at 6pm on Saturday, May 21, the Rapture is going to happen:-)
• · · · · Shortly after I began my working life, on the edge of the Westminster jungle, I landed a job with a political ‘big beast’; an alpha male, in very much the same mould as Dominique Strauss-Kahn: silver-haired, heavy-set, charismatic. Bear Pit ; Book titles are a touchy subject for writers. It’s not rare to hear an author complain in private about one of his or hers, and ache to reach back in time to swap it for something else. A different title for a fizzled book might have meant a different life for it. A Graphic Memoir That Earns the Designation
• · · · · · Despite the lack of food, there was a sense of optimism in the air. People discussed politics with intensity – a fervour that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier, the Russians I met told me. My perestroika generation ; There’s so many sides to Bob Dylan, he’s round Planet Dylan

CODA:

To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life.
-John Burroughs

---

Happy Silver Wedding Anniversary Christopher and Lidia

Back in 1986 when Sylvania Waters was not even a twinkle in the Sydney real television eye there was one wild wild party in the background ;-)

Married couples who love each other tell each other a thousand things without talking.
-Poet Cieslak

The Japanese have a word for it. It's Judo -- the art of conquering by yielding. The Czech or Polish equivalent of judo is, Yes, dear ;-)

All traditions to be thrown out the window at the Polish club on 21 May ...

---

On Gabbie's and Dragon's birthday, I think I’ll take this advice and forgive all who have oppressed media dragons. Not forever, just for today. To forgive the oppressor is the medicine that heals Happy Latin Amerikan Birthday Gabbie

---

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
-W.H. Auden, "Epitaph on a Tyrant" (courtesy of Peter W and Larraine; Bob and Sue; Irma and Garth)

OK, OK, I know: both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are cultural inventions, full stop. But I’m nonetheless gonna lay a bit of biology on this, for the same reason famously given for why climb Everest … because it’s there

Yes, I am still alive ;-) No, I didnot have a writer's block. I decided to take a sabbatical leave, that is all. Who says only professors can take a sabbatical leave?

Because It Was There We can’t help believing what we read. Spinoza said as much 400 years ago
Writers are idolized not because they love their fellow men, which is never a recommendation and in extreme instances leads to crucifixion, but because their self-love is in tune with current fears and desires, and in giving it expression they are speaking for an inarticulate multitude.
-Hugh Kingsmill, The Progress of a Biographer

Washington Post publisher Philip Graham famously described journalism as the “first rough draft of history” in a speech to Newsweek correspondents in 1963 — but as a new research paper from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism notes, that role is increasingly being played by social media such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook. The latest example is the coverage of the Osama bin Laden raid, which triggered questions about whether the person sharing news via social media was a journalist or not

• How Social Media Creates a Rough Draft of History [ A Canadian blogger has announced his own death in a heart-wrenching entry written before he succumbed to cancer posted on the day he died.Derek Miller,41,chronicled his battle with the disease since diagnosis in 2007,winning thousands of loyal readers. - You imagine it can't happen to you, and then it does. Life and Death ; What your literature professors tell you is true after all: reading narrative fiction helps make you more socially skilled. You become a better reader of other people’s minds and better able to navigate your complex social world. On the other hand, reading non-fiction does not seem to improve your social abilities]
• · Sohaib Athar, the Pakistani programmer who earned Internet fame on Sunday by inadvertently live blogging the U.S. raid on Osama bin Laden, is handling his 15 minutes -- and a never-ending barrage of media requests -- with uncommon good humor.
Bin Laden raid blogger enjoying his new-found fame Sohaib Athar ; From blogger to published author is the goal of many a blogger Kerri Sackville - How did you do it?
• · · A prominent blogger is planning a book exposing philandering politicians to coincide with the election. Blogger Cameron Slater plans to dish the dirt on male and female MPs from across the political spectrum. He said he had kiss-and-tell stories from women who claimed to have had affairs with male politicians, including one who said she had slept with three past and present ministers. Other sources included drivers and security staff. If you're an MP and you're partying, it's game over. The benchmark will be unethical behaviour.; NOTHING appears more surprizing to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. The soldan of EGYPT, or the emperor of ROME, might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination: But he must, at least, have led his mamalukes, or prætorian bands, like men, by their opinion
• · · · With over 10 million users, Blogger is significantly more popular than WordPress, the second on the scale of in-demand blog-hosting services. That may be because Blogger was established well before Google purchased the company, earning the early trust of the blogosphere Google’s Blogger Gets Geo-Location ; "If you've got nothing to hide," many people say, "you shouldn't worry about government surveillance." Others argue that we must sacrifice privacy for security. But as Daniel J. Solove argues in this important book, these arguments and many others are flawed. They are based on mistaken views about what it means to protect privacy and the costs and benefits of doing so. The debate between privacy and security has been framed incorrectly as a zero-sum game in which we are forced to choose between one value and the other. Why can't we have both? If you've got nothing to hide
• · · · · THANKFULLY, there's no law against bullying on the floor of the NSW Parliament. The first week of Parliament saw Labor get exactly what voters prescribed in March – a black eye Barry O'Farrell happily played bully-in-chief ; The Premier's trust-building agenda is being undermined by mixed messages ; Taste of Shallowness ;Using platitudes like “remarkable” and “dazzling” in flap copy is forgivable, but calling a book “funny” when it is anything but is a much worse crime Premier's list shows who's in and who's out
• · · · · · How do Americans spend their leisure time? The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends, participating in sports, or relaxing with the family. While people sometimes describe sex as their most pleasurable act, time-management studies find that the average American adult devotes just four minutes per day to sex The Pleasures of Imagination ; Playing the game in China: The Mafia versus the Prince and his Ministry of Truth

---

Greg aka Grog, noted that by and large the coverage of the Australian Budget 2011 in the newspapers was very good. Unanswerable Prayers to be answered ... O how love I thy law! it is my meditation all the day. ~Psalm 119:97

Compared to some countries, just about every single person in Australia is rich beyond their wildest dreams. Compared to some suburbs in Australia, 95% of Australians are poor.

I am Rich that is a bit RICH

---

Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer—he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive with him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along. I have no warm-up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink. I am apt to let something simmer for a while in my mind before trying to put it into words. I walk around, straightening pictures on the wall, rugs on the floor—as though not until everything in the world was lined up and perfectly true could anybody reasonably expect me to set a word down on paper.
— E.B. White, "The Art of the Essay" (Interview), The Paris Review1

Do something every day that you don't want to do;
this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
-- Mark Twain

The Story So Far: Truth in Reporting Can digital journalism be profitable? Skype Purchased by Microsoft for $8.5 Billion
What's making money, what isn't, and why?

A new report from Columbia University faculty members Bill Grueskin, academic dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and Ava Seave, principal at Quantum Media and adjunct professor at the Columbia Business School, addresses these questions about the financial state of digital journalism. The report provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the business challenges that for-profit news organizations face with their digital ventures. The report, The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism, is being issued by the school's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, which is committed to the research and advancement of journalism on digital platforms."

• The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism[Internetnews.com: communications provider Skype for some $8.5 billion in cash -- the largest acquisition in the company's history. The two companies said the deal was the result of an unsolicited offer from Microsoft and, if it passes regulatory hurdles, will make Skype a division of the software giant. The companies hope to finalize the purchase during the current calendar year. Microsoft sees the acquisition as key to its vision of a connected world which will have, the two companies hope, billions of users over time." Microsoft announced Tuesday that it is buying Internet ; Third parties, in particular advertisers, have accidentally had access to Facebook users’ accounts including profiles, photographs, chat, and also had the ability to post messages and mine personal information Facebook Applications Accidentally Leaking Access to Third Parties]
• · Truth in Reporting Tanner's media point proven...by media; LINDSAY Tanner has unwittingly given us an insight into federal Labor's political malaise. Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy
• · · The book is not a memoir, it is in fact much closer to George Megalogenis’ Quarterly Essay Trivial Pursuit, than it is some tell-all political autobiography Greg Jericho Grog's Gamut ; Google on Tanner
• · · · Like Jozef Imrich, raised in relative poverty, Geoff Dyer continues to live with little money and no sense of sacrifice – “a valuable skill, almost a privilege, for anyone wishing to become a writer” Whatever form it takes, your childhood always seems perfectly normal ; First, before we turn our attention to Stalin, to Soviet-era dissidence and to debates about Dmitri Shostakovich’s memoirs, listen: Shostakovich: party hack or secret dissident? Listen closely: Here is an ironist who scorned the Communist Party he submitted to What Shostakovich Was Really Expressing

"I have lately been reading both Joyce and Proust with considerable disappointment; they both seem to me very sick men, giant invalids who, in spite of enormous talent, were crippled by the same disease, elephantiasis of the ego. They both attempted titanic tasks, and both failed for lack of that dull but healthy quality without which no masterpiece can be contrived, a sense of proportion."
-Cyril Connolly, "Comment" (Horizon, May 1941)

---

In the center of Prague is a statue of the early 15th-century Czech church reformer Jan Hus that bears the motto: “Truth will prevail.” Thanks to Kovály’s memoir that motto, at least as it pertains to the 20th century, is being borne out.

Deb Richards has worked as a reporter, producer and executive producer on some of the most prestigious programs on Australian current affairs television, including ABC's Four Corners, Lateline and Media Watch programs as well as SBS-TV. She is a multi-award winner, and in 1999 she was joint winner of the Gold Walkley -- Australia's top award for excellence in journalism Gold Walkley The selling of journalism Cash for Comment

There is only one rule. Astonish us! Here’s a test: You now have thirty seconds to recommend a single book that might start a serious student on the hard road to understanding the political tragedies of the 20th century. What book would you choose? Of course, half a minute doesn’t leave much room for reflection—once you’ve arrived at the end of this sentence, your time is all but up. Still, I doubt that most readers of The American Interest will have had much difficulty coming up with several classic works before the clock ran out. ;-) Jozef Imrich's Cold River :-) and Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago would be prime candidates to capture the Soviet side of the horror; Victor Klemperer’s secret diaries published in two volumes as I Will Bear Witness document in deep detail the Nazi side of the totalitarian coin. That Heda Margolius Kovály had to write a memoir about life under Nazism and Communism is a horror. That she did it so well is a gift

Mussolini conceived it, Hitler commissioned it, Stalin perfected it, Saddam obsessed over the design of it: Totalitarian Art of Barry O'Barrell

Structure, rhythm, precision – any good sentence is good in its own way. The best ones can move peoples’ souls.. Mighty River Mighty Pen

---

A diplomat is one who thinks twice before saying nothing.
-Jozef Imrich

It is better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
- Mark Twain

NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell will have to debate the controversial Barangaroo development in Parliament now that protesters have amassed more than 10,000 signatures opposing the Sydney project. Independent MP and Sydney lord mayor Clover Moore was formally presented with the signatures today, the first working day of the new Parliament. There is significant concern across the community about the future of Barangaroo - a very important public site, adjacent to our city and on our precious harbour, Cr Moore said at the presentation outside State Parliament Barangaroo



Mr Keating chairs the Barangaroo Design Excellence review panel and has taken aim at Ms Moore's support for a review of 22-hectare development in Sydney's East Darling Harbour precinct Keating unleashes the lip on 'muesli-chewing' Moore

CODA: All the world is mad save for me and thee, and sometimes I wonder about thee: It’s always nice when former Prime Minister Paul Keating chimes in with an opinion on Australian politics, isn’t it? In a world where nothing is certain, at least you can always count on his sharp tongue to deliver a verbal whipping that is both insightful and reflecting the state of his mind Mad Bastard with bleeding heart
In the race of life always back self-interest…at least you know it's trying G'day scumbags: I have never killed a man but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure
-A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory. He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up. - Paul Keating, a gentle needle A negative impression of Ramrods' manager
Paul Keating lives with his mum in Potts Point and he is dating actress Julieanne Newbould who I always knew as Jules. Jules

Everyone has the right to be stupid but you're abusing the priviledge. -- Keating sees red over charge and wins the day

Ironically, Laws and Keating might also be connected in the Cash for Comment inquiry. We have to consider people like pork and exploit them to the max -- Mr Constantinidis's lawyer, Philip Beazley, said his client was too unwell to appear in court and entered guilty pleas to three charges under the Taxation Administration Act on his behalf Achillies ''Big Al''Constantinidis

PS: It was a cold winter day. An old man walked out onto a frozen cold river, cut a hole in the ice and dropped in his fishing line. He was there for almost an hour, without even a nibble, when a young boy walked out onto the ice, cut a hole in the ice not far from him. The young boy dropped his fishing line and minutes later he hooked a Largemouth Bass. The old man couldn't believe his eyes but chalked it up to plain luck. But, shortly thereafter, the young boy pulled in another large catch.
The young boy kept catching fish after fish. Finally, the old man couldn't take it any longer. "Son, I've been here for over an hour without even a nibble. You've been here only a few minutes and have caught a half dozen fish! How do you do it?"
The boy responded, "Roo raf roo reep ra rums rrarm."
"What was that?" the old man asked.
Again the boy responded, "Roo raf roo reep ra rums rarrm."
"Look," said the old man, "I can't understand a word you're saying.
The boy spit the bait into his hand and said, " You have to keep the worms warm!

Lessons Learned - Behind the $430m Wickenby saga

Lessons Learned - Behind the $430m Wickenby saga

Part I: Hundreds of celebrities, business people and tax specialists have been caught in Project Wickenby. Neil Chenoweth | Fiona Buffini | Hannah Low *Updated Jun 2, 2011 – 5.10pm, first published at May 3, 2011 – 12.01am 

 Adam Hargraves isn’t formal about nightwear, so when the federal police turned up at his Sanctuary Cove home at 7am, the Porsche-loving businessman was protecting his valuables with only a throw cushion. 

Twenty kilometres down the road, moments before the federal police walked in, a frantic office manager threw an accounts book out the 11th floor window. 

Across the country in Perth, former rock star Glenn Wheatley was woken by a call from his wife saying more than 20 police had turned up with a warrant to search their Melbourne home and had been “literally going through everything". It was Thursday, June 9, 2005 – the day Australia’s biggest tax investigation went public.

In the six years since, Project Wickenby has split Australians. Who’s the villain here: the scheming promoters, the celebrity tax avoiders, the naive clients or, perhaps, the tax enforcers? The Australian Financial Review has talked to the players in the $430 million Project Wickenby saga, and sifted through court testimony and judgments that mark the trail of a decade-long operation.

“You could just see how easy it was for someone to come here with a laptop, sign some people on and suddenly all the documentation gets done overseas . . . there’s nothing more cancerous – once these things catch on, they become like wildfire," tax commissioner Michael D’Ascenzo recalls. “What really concerned us was there were people coming here peddling these arrangements across a broad cross-section of the community, not just high-wealth individuals," he says.

Wickenby has resulted in 2800 audits, raked in $553 million, sent 18 people to prison while 42 people wait to be tried.

In a three-part series, the Wickenby story reveals how hiding your money overseas became commonplace for a rising class of entrepreneurs; how an Australian Taxation Office operation became the centre of a global attack on tax haven bank accounts; and the attempts to pressure politicians to shut down or limit investigations.

But there are also deep fears about whether hundreds of new cases can ever be brought to trial as time runs out.

The money runs out in June 2013 – along with the legal window that allows Wickenby to operate.

Worse, the taskforce faces two official inquiries while offshore tax schemes are still growing.

The future of this new breed of inter-agency investigation is a major policy question that is the subject of extensive public debate.

Not every taxpayer targeted by Wickenby is guilty of tax crime, and it is wrong to make any assumptions about those charged until their cases are decided by the courts.

But the cases that have been before the courts build a picture of the folly and hubris that produced a train crash.

The Tax Office has identified 200 promoters of the overseas schemes but knows there are many more.

“Every couple of months you get someone coming in from Europe, they’d be involved in private banks, they’re all very smooth but they’re salesmen," one tax adviser told the Financial Review.

The master salesman, one Philip Egglishaw, first came to the attention of Wickenby insiders in 2002, but he’d been selling his wares for almost 20 years undetected for the Strachans accounting firm in Jersey he owned with his brother, Richard.

In a tough field, Egglishaw stood out to his Australian clients as the epitome of the solid English businessman – pinstripes, bowler hat, quietly exuding charm and wealth.

Sydney tax barrister Peter Fraser had known Strachans since the 1980s. “I was familiar with them and Mr Egglishaw," Fraser, a prosecution witness, told the Local Court last year. 

“Mr Egglishaw used to visit Australia regularly, and when he visited he would come to see me when I was a partner at Baker and McKenzie. He acted for clients of mine."

It was “a handful of accounts over 15, 20 years – he provided trustee and accounting services and loans".

Was there ever anything untoward? “Not at all," Fraser testified.

For the senior ranks at the Tax Office – from commissioner Michael Carmody, to the man who would succeed him, Michael D’Ascenzo – and across the organisation, the bottom of the harbour schemes of the late 1970s and early ’80s had been bad enough.

Then the Costigan Royal Commission in 1984 underscored the stunning speed with which tax avoidance schemes had grown and were posing a serious threat to the tax base that runs government.

D’Ascenzo recalls the days after he began as a graduate in the Tax Office’s tax avoidance branch in 1977 chasing the “mass-marketed paper schemes", the most notorious of which were the bottom of the harbour schemes that were “attacking the system on all fronts".

“What that taught me was if you allow widespread disrespect for the tax laws, then you can’t really expect honest citizens to really shoulder that burden," D’Ascenzo says. “It forces honest citizens to rethink their position and it reduces the integrity of the country overall, in terms of its ethics and morals."

“It was almost seen as optional for rich people to pay their tax," he says. “Where respect for the law and the systems is lost, it creates a downward spiral and it took a long time for Australia to get out of that spiral."

In the late 1980s, the Tax Office had switched its attention to the big end of town, which had received little scrutiny so far, launching the large-case audit program, run by then assistant commissioner D’Ascenzo.

In 1988, the ATO raided the Sydney premises of Citibank, seizing hundreds of documents relating to a suspected tax-avoidance scheme. One of the officers was Michael O’Neill, a 23-year-old still finishing his law degree who, a decade later, would join the taskforce formed to investigate tax scheme promoters.

In 1989, one of the key Costigan reforms was realised with the formation of the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre, AUSTRAC, to monitor money laundering.

By the late 1990s, the tax avoidance focus shifted to mass-marketed tax schemes, many of them based on dubious agricultural projects, films and superannuation benefits. 

They featured many of the hallmarks of tax schemes in the past: the use of overseas vehicles and tax havens, aggressive legal tactics to block the authorities, and promotion by accountants and lawyers.

That episode, which D’Ascenzo says was “disappointing", led to the creation of the serious non-compliance unit, from which Wickenby would later emerge. It is led by deputy commissioner Michael Cranston, who says the difference between Wickenby and the earlier tax schemes is stark.

“The difference with these schemes was the documentation supporting them was offshore," Cranston says. “So if this grew, it’s very difficult for administrators to actually get the information to identify the people involved and also if you needed to go to court – that was a really big concern."

Strachans, through Egglishaw, had entrée everywhere. In Sydney during the ’80s and ’90s he was a trusted contact for the chairman of the Law Council of Australia’s tax committee, Ross Seller. The Jersey businessman was also a contact for Dibbs Barker Gosling senior partner Paul Gregory; in Perth, Greg Calder of Butcher Paull & Calder and tax consultant Greg Dunn; and in Melbourne, lawyer Michael Brereton.

“I’ve got no reason to believe that anything Philip did was illegal," Brereton has told the Financial Review.

Brereton met Egglishaw in 1989 when he was a partner with Barker Gosling. “Any time I had a client going overseas who needed international advice, I’d send them to Philip," Brereton says. “I’ve always found him to be an honest and honourable professional person."

Egglishaw met the former Masters Apprentices guitarist Wheatley when he had fallen on hard times in about March 1994.

Wheatley was working for sports agent International Management Group and staged John Farnham’s hugely successful Talk of the Town tour, although most of his income went to his bankruptcy trustee.

Wheatley says Paul Gregory, who was also a director of IMG, introduced him to Egglishaw, who explained how the $256,410 that was Wheatley’s share of the Farnham tour takings could be funnelled overseas as a “management fee" to a Strachans account for Wheatley. It would be repaid to Wheatley as a loan, on which interest could was charged, though both the loan and the management fee turned out to be shams.

The Tax Office was already chasing Wheatley – he owed $180,000 from an earlier tax bill. Wheatley maintains he was never told the Strachans arrangement was illegal – in fact, he thought the 15 per cent that Strachans and Gregory charged in fees was Swiss withholding tax. He was struggling to pay private school fees for his three children but he maintains the real reason he did the deal was to pay his old tax bill.

“In my naivety, my understanding from a tax point of view was that this was not illegal, as I thought I was paying tax in Switzerland," Wheatley says in his autobiography, Facing the Music. “I was uneasy about it, but at the time I had no alternative."

In April 1994, a month after Farnham’s tour, Egglishaw’s burgeoning links to the entertainment industry led him to Tony Stewart, the Sydney accountant for Paul Hogan and his partner, John Cornell .

The Tax Office had had suspicions about whether part of the Crocodile Dundee royalties were channelled overseas, but had lost a court challenge in the late ’80s.

While the Tax Office didn’t know it, Hogan and Cornell had become Client No. 1 and Client No. 2 in the Strachan files – and in Egglishaw’s Rolodex (according to Crime Commission documents in a Federal Court case before Justice Margaret Stone).

It was so easy. Channelling money overseas as payments for what Wickenby investigators contend were fictitious invoices, sham insurance policies and pretend management fees could be done in a blink.

“All I had to do was approve it," says Wheatley. “The lawyer sent the money off, deducted his secret fee and arranged for the money to come back as a loan."

The Tax Office meanwhile was struggling to keep abreast of the endless new schemes put up by tax promoters, and court battles over whether, when they finally did get hold of documents outlining a tax avoidance scheme, they were prevented from seeing them because of legal privilege claims.

Former Commonwealth Tax Ombudsman Peter Haggstrom put it: “The doctrine of legal professional privilege acts like a `cone of silence’ against the ATO’s attempts to get to the bottom of tax transactions."

Onshore tax schemes were hard enough. But the offshore schemes were almost impossible to detect. And Egglishaw was only one of many travelling salesmen. “Everyone is doing it," an accountant told a Wickenby offender.

And what was the harm?

“You don’t think about it at the time –I don’t think we went in there thinking we were hurting anyone," another convicted Wickenby target says. “We just thought that this is how it was done. We didn’t sit around in a dark room talking about this. We were talking to accountants from reputable firms."

The offshore tax schemes appealed to John Howard’s aspirational Australia: solid, successful citizens whose businesses had suddenly taken off.

One such Sydney executive lost his job but started a rival business under his house with less than $50,000. “In the first six months, we turned over $500,000 and made profit of $40,000; we were expecting $1 million for the full year," he says. “We were panicking about paying our first lease on new grounds, we had no security."

The threat of paying provisional tax was looming. But his partner had heard about an accountant who ran an overseas scheme.

The false invoicing began in a small way. But seven years later, the business was turning over $35 million a year and the tax fraud had become huge.

Today he says he is embarrassed and financially destroyed but, like Wheatley, thinks there was no alternative: “It’s probably something that needed to happen at the time because we were unsure of our financial status. We were unclear, a bit naïve. I guess we were getting something for nothing."

Australian Crime Commission chief John Lawler is dismissive: “What’s happened is these people are sponging off the normal taxpayer. And it’s as simple and easy as that."

What do you do, Lawler asks, “if you’re a dry cleaner and you’re paying $10 million a year tax and your competitor next door is not?"

You either get forced out of business by your competitor, or you join the tax fraud set, say Wickenby investigators.

Another pair of aspirational businessmen, Glenn and Adam Hargraves, were prominent in the Mormon community at Nerang on the Gold Coast hinterland and they had big plans.

By 1999, the Hargraves’ Phone Directories Company (PDC), was doing so well in producing rival telephone directories to Telstra that Adam called his wife’s uncle, accountant John Feddema, to set up a meeting with the Sovereign Capital funding group.

The Sovereign Capital adviser suggested setting up a company in Panama and sending money to a bank in Latvia.

Feddema had another name. He faxed Philip Egglishaw’s business card to the Hargrave brothers together with a letter from Strachans to another client (Feddema had no other involvement).

Egglishaw explained to the Hargraves how it all worked. Ideally they would have a British Virgin Islands company owned by a trust. This would be controlled by a trustee company in Jersey. If it was too expensive, Strachans ran in-house companies.

By September 1999, Strachans had set up Amber Rock Ltd in the British Virgin Islands and the Gabriel Trust in Jersey for Adam Hargraves. Other trusts were set up for Glenn Hargraves and later for British-born lawyer Daniel Stoten when he took a 10 per cent stake in PDC.

“Amber Rock Ltd has been given a London address for cosmetic purposes and is effectively controlled from our office by the provision of directors and company secretary," Egglishaw wrote to Adam. “Again, you will have no relationship with the company in any way and must not be seen to have any control."

Egglishaw had provided unsigned letters of resignation for the “protector" to the trust, who controls the trustees, so that Hargraves and Stoten could seize control at any time.

By October, their new friend Philip was ushering Glenn and Adam and Daniel into the premier suite at the Brisbane Sheraton, where he and his entourage were bivouacking, and passing over the new Standard Chartered gold debit cards they could use to retrieve their overseas funds from ATMs.

The seduction was complete. It was so simple. The Hargraves’ Phone Directories Company had a Chinese firm typeset their directories for about $120,000. Amber Rock would then invoice PDC for 10 times that amount and, just like that, $1 million a year of income miraculously vanished beyond the reach of the tax man.

All of this was off the radar, because by the late 1990s, the ATO was facing a deluge of onshore tax schemes. It wasn’t just that investors didn’t pay tax, but they often claimed large deductions from non-recourse loans that meant they were extracting large sums of money from the tax revenue. They ranged from schemes within the letter of the law, to blatant shams. More worrying, by 1999, some of the tax promoters were moving their schemes offshore.

In June 1999, in addition to the Hargraves, Egglishaw was also talking to Ross Seller at Gadens and accountant Patrick McCarthy, who were getting into whisky. A lot of whisky.

Over 25 months they would raise $24.5 million cash from 190 Australian investors, who would also borrow three times as much by a letter of credit from a company called Chambers Finance. Investors would claim $46.7 million in tax refunds.

Ian Gzell, QC, (now a justice of the Supreme Court of NSW) and barrister Peter Fraser, asked to give an opinion on the whisky scheme in June 2000, concluded that “no factor is present which objectively suggests that the scheme could fall foul of the tests in Part IVA" (the anti-avoidance provisions of the Tax Act). There has been no criticism of the role either lawyer played.

Asked about the Chambers Finance loan, Fraser testified last November, “I knew it was somehow related to Strachans." He didn’t know Chambers Finance, but “if I was lending money to someone I’d certainly go into the background. If someone is lending money to me, I don’t need to go into the background."

According to documents filed with the Local Court in Sydney, Seller and McCarthy had lined up a Scottish distillery to make whisky for them at £2, or $5.15, a litre, but the investment scheme was priced at $30 a litre.

Over the three tax years, Chambers Finance was supposed to provide $73 million of loans, taking the total project to $98.9 million. 

Investors would put down $125,000 cash and take a letter of credit for another $375,000 from Chambers Finance, for 100 hogsheads of whisky. They would report their $500,000 investment as a tax deduction, and claim a tax refund of $242,500 – doubling their money, though subsequent whisky sales would be taxable.

But according to the documents, the loans from Chambers Finance were never drawn down. The promoters paid Speyside Distillery $16.5 million over the three tax years. This left $8 million from the investors’ money for expenses and profits for the promoters.

And there was nothing necessarily wrong with this. They have pleaded not guilty to conspiracy and dishonestly influencing a tax officer.

By 2001 it was clear the 60,000 people involved in the onshore mass-marketed schemes had claimed $4 billion in deductions – which the Tax Office wanted back.

Early that year, the Senate Economics Committee handed down a stinging critique of how schemes had been allowed to grow out of control and called for measures to target the promoters of tax avoidance schemes. There would be changes to tax laws.

In late 2001, Carmody set up a scheme promoters taskforce, managed by O’Neill, now an assistant commissioner but still in his late 30s. O’Neill’s taskforce began by targeting a series of schemes based on films and retirement villages in Melbourne.

In Brisbane in 2002, Christopher Cornell (no relation to John) and Ian Cameron heard about a Gold Coast accountant called Ewan Stoddart who supposedly knew how to reduce tax through offshore loans. Stoddart wasn’t connected with Strachans -- he had business links in Vanuatu that the Tax Office would soon be chasing.

Cornell and Cameron decided they needed someone like Stoddart when they realised that $400,000 of unclaimed supplier rebates for their Giants liquor wholesaling business would leave the business with a huge provisional tax bill and cash-flow problems.

When they fronted Stoddart, they told the Queensland Magistrates Court, he suggested a set of back-dated invoices for the Giants business that whisked $341,000 overseas. Stoddart would keep 20 per cent and send the rest of the money back as an offshore “loan" to Cameron and Cornell, who could then loan it back to Giant.

Their new financial director, Donald Hood, told Cameron and Cornell it was illegal. He showed them the section in the Accountants Manual that spelled out the offence and the penalties. Cornell told him not to worry, Stoddart would never put them in that position.

Melbourne entertainment lawyer Michael Brereton was similarly naïve about the offshore tax scheme he’d become involved with. But Brereton and his production of the musical Jolson were among 30 tax scheme promotions under surveillance. Brereton had raised $3.2 million from high-profile investors together with letters of credit for more than $8 million from a Strachans British Virgin Islands company, Westminster Finance.

The loan meant the investors could claim back as a tax refund more than they had invested, thanks to the loan from Westminster, which could only be paid back out of the show’s profits – and unfortunately the show had flopped.

It wasn’t until O’Neill’s task force was beefed up to 55 tax officers in mid 2002 and Brereton’s marriage to Sian Stokes broke up that things came to a head.

Brereton blamed his ex-wife (though she denies this) for fingering him to the taskforce, which raided his law firm on May 22.

“Sixteen wealthy clients of another promoter visited today claimed $15 million in deductions in 1999 through a theatre scheme," the Tax Office announced.

Brereton later told journalists, “In 2002, you get a raid and that gave them the link to Egglishaw." Brereton himself would emerge unscathed.

Other Egglishaw clients were not doing so well. The Tax Office had disallowed the deductions that Seller and McCarthy’s investors were claiming on the whisky scheme.

On the Gold Coast, the Mormon Hargraves had also suffered a setback. 

One of their staff, Dirk Smibert, had been a director of Phone Directories Company since 1996 and, crucially, a very devout Mormon.

The Hargraves wanted to keep Smibert on staff, and offered him a 4 per cent stake in PDC. But he balked when they explained he would have to take his dividends from Jersey in cash through an ATM.

Adam and Daniel Stoten told Smibert he was “ignorant" and that it was all “completely above board". However, on April 12, 2002, Smibert resigned.

“Admittedly, financial management is not among my talents," he wrote.

But he did not feel comfortable that Stoten had just told him that if he tried to pay tax on his dividends he could jeopardise his fellow shareholders’ tax position. “I do not want to lose what I believe I have earned and am entitled to and indeed what I have relied on, but I am prepared to if it comes to it," he added.

Smibert then went off to head a Mormon mission to New Zealand. In hindsight, the best person to recruit into an offshore tax fraud is probably not a Mormon missionary.

Actor Paul Hogan was also doing a deal that would cause him headaches.

On July 18, 2002, Hogan allegedly had a little windfall when Trelene Investments, the British Virgin Islands company set up for Hogan by Phil de Figueiredo of Egglishaw’s firm Strachans, paid $US5 million to Hogan in a “sham" transaction for the rights to make Crocodile Dundee 4. At least that is what the Australian Crime Commission would claim in a document later obtained by Hogan’s lawyers, who filed it in the Federal Court.

The ACC document says Hogan told US tax authorities he was moving back to live in Australia on July 1, but he told the Tax Office he became a resident on July 26, so he was stateless when Trelene made the payment.

By late 2002, Monaghan and O’Neill at the Tax Office had pulled together enough about Egglishaw and his relationship with Brereton to want to call in help from the newly formed Australian Crime Commission.

By May 2003, they had convinced the new head of the Australian Crime Commission, Alastair Milroy, and the ACC board to open a joint investigation with the ATO into money laundering and tax fraud.

It would begin with Brereton and Egglishaw. It was called Operation Duxford. On Egglishaw’s next trip to Australia, the Crime Commission searched his Sydney hotel room after he booked out on November 4 and found Strachans brochures explaining their tax schemes.

The circle was closing on Egglishaw’s Australian clients, but none of them was aware of this, and the deals continued.

Wheatley says he always believed that Strachans’ fees were Swiss tax. He maintained this belief even when he managed to negotiate the fees down to 11 per cent in 2003 in a deal that diverted $400,000 of his profit from a Kostya Tszyu boxing match to Switzerland. (Dibbs Barker Gosling senior partner Paul Gregory was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the Commonwealth over the Kostya Tszyu profits but was cleared of charges that he assisted Wheatley’s 1994 tax evasion.)

In early 2004, after an Australian government request, Jersey authorities raided Strachans offices in Jersey.

Philip Egglishaw walked out of Customs at Tullamarine airport on the morning of February 14 and turned on his phone, to learn of the Jersey raids from his brother, Richard. Philip headed directly to the presidential suite at Sheraton Towers Southgate, and asked for a shredder.

This is the scene that defines Operation Wickenby and almost a decade of tax investigations, as Crime Commission officer Gail McClure and her team burst into Egglishaw’s suite and seized his laptop that detailed all his Australian clients.

But the action was just beginning. Egglishaw called his brother Richard in Geneva. Strachans then began calling clients.

By that afternoon, Mormon Adam Hargraves and his lawyer Daniel Stoten on the Gold Coast had heard about the raid. They in turn called “Uncle John" Feddema, wanting more information.

The raids had interrupted Egglishaw’s plans to meet his lawyer mate Brereton in Melbourne. But Brereton had other worries as well, after Law Society of Victoria investigator Ronald Hall turned up to audit his law firm’s trust account.

Brereton had drawn $50,000 that belonged to a British Virgin Island company called Westminster Finance that had previously financed Jolson. Hall told Brereton to pay it back, which he did on Tuesday February 17 – then two days later moved it back again marked as expenses, the court later found.

Egglishaw didn’t get to meet Brereton because he was enduring a five-day interrogation at the hands of Tim Sage of the Crime Commission. He appears to have spoken freely before flying out on March 1.

Soon after his return from Australia, Egglishaw accidentally killed his hard drive on the laptop, leaving him with no record of what the Crime Commission held.

The fear of being drawn into the crackdown on Egglishaw was spreading across Australia.

On the Gold Coast, Daniel Stoten was emailing Strachans in Jersey to ask for account balances for all accounts, but got no reply.

By March 24, Stoten was in Geneva to see Egglishaw personally. Egglishaw told Stoten to stop emailing, and to communicate only by telephone. (Strachans provided its top clients with European registered phones that Australian police could not tap.)

Egglishaw also told Stoten he would have to use new Visa cards in the name of someone overseas.

Meanwhile, the Wickenby team was struggling to work through the wealth of material copied from Egglishaw’s laptop. It was the biggest single source of tax intelligence that most of the tax officers had ever seen--and unlike the 1988 Citibank raid, this time they did not have to give the documents back. 

What they read there appalled them, set alarm bells ringing right up to the top of the Tax Office, to Treasury and to the Treasurer’s office. If they took hold, these schemes would go viral and there would be no stopping them.

D’Ascenzo says: “When we saw the laptop and the information that was available there, which was really ‘give me some details and I’ll give you some documentation’ – that really becomes open slather. You really have to say that is not the behaviour you have in Australia."

The head of the federal Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Chris Craigie, SC, says: “Wickenby when it surfaced was seen as a very serious threat to the taxation system and something that could cripple the revenue."

Tax barrister Michael Inglis says Wickenby is a far more “real time" reaction to tax crime than we have seen before, including the bottom of the harbour schemes 30 years ago, where only a handful of promoters were prosecuted eight to 10 years after the event.

“Wickenby is a modern response to a modern threat to the integrity of our entire tax system and is utterly different to anything that has gone before it," Inglis says.

Inglis, who has represented Wickenby targets, says the overseas element makes the schemes a systemic risk in the way the mass-marketed rorts a decade ago were not: “I’ve seen arrangements where you have accountants in a tax haven who are the directors, and managers of a tax haven company with millions of dollars in the bank. The company appears to be totally controlled by the accountants but a person in Australia is the only one authorised to use the bank accounts. That’s a threat and I believe they are just nibbling at the problem."

Meanwhile, how to use Egglishaw’s files? The team turned to AUSTRAC to try to trace the cash trails documented in the laptop.

The Australian Crime Commission ramped up nine investigations into clients of adviser Strachans while the Tax Office ran its own investigations into several dozen more. 

The Attorney General’s Department and the DPP would set up requests for more raids in Jersey and Geneva to coincide with Australian search warrants.

None of this was apparent to Egglishaw. The ruckus over the laptop seemed to have subsided. His clients could still access their overseas cash with new credit cards issued by Corner Banca in Switzerland in other people’s names, so that there was no paper trail for the Tax Office to follow.

Egglishaw’s laptop had lists of credit card records with partially obscured names. On December 3, 2003, under the name “Jo Co" there were three withdrawals from the Brunswick Hotel, which the Tax Office would later claim in Federal Court were made by John Cornell, whose Hizan Holdings Pty Ltd owned the hotel.

For Strachans’ clients, it was business as usual – until the morning it all fell apart.

From 7am east-coast time on June 9, 2005, 285 federal police and tax officers executed 48 search warrants and the Tax Office executed 37 Section 263 access visits over two days to law firms, accountants and clients from Brisbane to Perth.

In Perth, when Glenn Wheatley put down the phone from his wife Gaynor, he phoned Paul Gregory. The senior corporate lawyer told Wheatley not to talk on the phone because it was probably bugged, and to get a lawyer.

On the Gold Coast, Daniel Stoten returned from the gym to find policemen searching his home as his wife made their children breakfast.

Stoten called Glenn Hargraves to ask the $5 million question: “Did they get the card?"

No, the Banca Corner Visa debit card was safe, Glenn told him.

“Good," said Stoten, and rang off to call Adam Hargraves. The police had not found Adam’s card either. “They really haven’t got nothin’ there then," Stoten told Adam.

The calls became a blur. Adam to Daniel again, discussing what the police had seized, and making plans to meet at Glenn’s house.

Another call. This time it was Philip Egglishaw on the line to Stoten, quietly reassuring.

Egglishaw: “They’re fishing now in Australia, because they can’t get anything from my area."

Stoten: “They’ll get bits and pieces from us, there’s no doubt. But they won’t get much."

Stoten was more worried by the time he called “Uncle John" Feddema.

Feddema: “Um, you wouldn’t have anything at home though would you?"

Stoten: “Um, I’ve just, the only, nothing at home, the only thing they got was they got the [mumbles] – the fucking card."

The Federal Police had found a Premium Intercard Visa Card in the name of Donald Ward in Stoten’s wallet in his LandCruiser.

In Adam Hargraves’s wallet they found a Visa card in the name of Gry Stenson.

They missed a third card, in the name of David Winterbottom, that Glenn’s wife Joanna Hargraves had in her handbag. Glenn told investigators he destroyed it.

At other locations, documents went down the toilet or were tossed out windows, as they were by the Hargraves’ office manager, as the mass raids created great panic.

In Sydney, tax lawyer Geoff Stein had settled in at 9am to conduct a job interview at his firm Brown Wright Stein. Then the phone started ringing. And ringing. 

The job interview took two and a half hours as he was continually interrupted by panicking clients. The calls were still coming in at 9.30 that night, when Stein decided to go to a client whose business premises were still being searched.

Senior Wickenby staff were on tenterhooks as the secret raids rolled out. A casual query to the Federal Police by Financial Review journalist Angus Grigg about rumours a Perth stockbroker had been raided had Crime Commission chief Alastair Milroy on the phone within minutes, asking Grigg not to break the story.

The next day, as further raids continued, the PDC office manager on the Gold Coast told Daniel Stoten that she had looked around outside the Niecon Plaza building and had found the accounts book she had thrown out during the search. Stoten told her to destroy the book. He told another employee to wipe data: “Anything remotely connected with any of those names, get rid of [it]."

Stoten fell to worrying. He had $40,000 cash in a Commonwealth Bank of Australia deposit box. How to get it out? He didn’t want to be identified so, remarkably, he asked his brother to get him a disguise. He went to the bank in costume, only to lose his nerve when he saw police waiting outside the bank.

Stoten and his wife Katherine spoke on the phone – and they were desperate.

Daniel: “The whole point of that was because we thought that’s the way to do it so it’s legal, and this is how it ends up, it’s just really, it absolutely rocks my mind."

Katherine: “But how, how do we explain the credit card though? Like I mean, if they say to me have I seen it, yes I’ve seen the credit card, and I mean it’s in someone else’s fricken’ name, I mean how fraudulent is that?"

A jury would later convict Stoten and Adam Hargaves but find Glenn not guilty because he stepped down from the business before Smibert told them it was fraud.

Meanwhile the Tax Office, the Crime Commission, the Federal Police, AUSTRAC and the Director of Public Prosecutions were overwhelmed by a mountain of new material from the June raids. 

“Wickenby was quite an extreme concern for the tax authorities because of the marketability, the ease of selling these schemes, and the ability to hide the evidence. Because of that we really needed the agencies to come together to deal with it," the ATO’s Cranston says. 

D’Ascenzo says the “turning point was the ability to provide sufficient information to the government of the day to persuade them this was a sufficient risk and to fund it as a project".

But at least some of the targets of the June 2005 raids seemed nonchalant about the fuss.

Yes, Glenn Wheatley admitted, he had been raided but it was all very straightforward and he was certain nothing would come of it.

“As far as I can tell, it’s just routine and nothing else," he said. “I’m surprised this hasn’t happened earlier in my life."

News of the raids didn’t seem to faze others, such as Michael Milne, much either.

Milne had cashed out a large parcel of shares he had transferred overseas to five corporate trusts called stichtings that Sydney lawyer Anne Harley had set up for him in the Dutch Antilles.

With the shares sold by mid-2005 just before the raids, it was time to spend.

There was $270,000 for a yacht he named Black Snake, $5 million or so on houses, $71,534 for the Bentley, and $390,000 for a Jeffrey Smart painting, The New School, which looked rather fetching in his new lounge room, or so the Federal Police would comment three years later when they raided Milne’s home. He was jailed for eight years for money laundering.

Like Milne, insurance broker Charles Pratten had bought a few treats with the insurance premiums he shipped off to his company in Vanuatu, according to prosecution claims in court.

Pratten had school fees to pay, but through a web of companies he still managed to pick up a 45-foot game fishing boat, Los Lobos, a farm at Wards River and a Robinson R44 helicopter (there was some confusion as to whether he owned it personally or, as he suggested, it was part of his company’s air wing).

The Wickenby insiders were heading to warmer climes as well.

One investigation began when tax officers auditing an Australian accounting firm noticed that many of the clients were paying invoices to Vanuatu.

The Federal Police ran four separate operations investigating suspected cash transfers to and from the Vanuatu – although it’s important to note there were plenty of legitimate investments in the island.

These investigations would not come to light until 2008. As always, Project Wickenby operated in secret. But there would be a secret running behind all the other secrets – a side of the Wickenby investigation that has never been acknowledged.

It began with two strange emails. One went to British Revenue & Customs in late 2005, but they were too slow to respond. So the anonymous emailer wrote to the German secret service, the BND, in January 2006.

The emailer offered to provide detailed records for €3.5 billion in investments held in a tax haven. The writer was not seeking payment for this information, he said, but it seemed “deeply unfair that multimillionaires could continue to amass their fortunes without paying taxes".

However, he wanted far more than that. He wanted to live in Australia.

nchenoweth@afr.com.au

fbuffini@afr.com.au

HLow@fairfaxmedia.com.au

Fiona Buffini helps to drive the Financial Review's news agenda and oversees how we deliver the news on afr.com and via our other digital platforms. She is a former news editor and national reporter. Email Fiona at fbuffini@afr.com

Hannah Low writes on Business specialising in Legal. Based in our Sydney newsroom, Hannah is a Walkley Award winner and Legal editor. Connect with Hannah on Twitter.