How Vanda Gould’s secret world fell apart
He spent months coaching his Belgian lawyer to lie in court to protect his double life. It ended badly.
Vanda Gould’s case will be back before the courts on April 7. He is pictured here leaving Surry Hills police headquarters in October 2013. Rob Homer
Accountant Vanda Gould was talking money as the man he had coached to lie for him headed for Sydney airport. Peter Borgas would be rewarded, Gould promised over the phone: “John and I had a figure of a hundred thousand in mind.”
John was Gould’s business partner, John Leaver, former chairman of the Sunland Group. But that night in October 2013, after a gruelling four days in the witness box, Borgas, a Belgian lawyer based in Switzerland, couldn’t get out of Australia fast enough.
Gould was living a double life, as a respected accountant and pillar of the Anglican church, while hiding a huge offshore empire built on a $383 million tax fraud. Borgas was in Sydney to protect it all.
It was about to come unstuck. As Borgas’ taxi neared Mascot, Australian Federal Police were preparing to move.
Gould was arrested at his home in Chatswood on tax fraud charges. Borgas was held in the airport departure lounge while Leaver was arrested in his Point Piper home in his pyjamas.
The saga relates to one of the biggest tax frauds in Australian history. It’s due to be revisited on April 7, when Gould appeals against his 2019 conviction for attempting to pervert the course of justice.
Ever since that night in 2013, rumours have swirled about what the AFP found in Borgas’ briefcase. It can now be revealed after the delayed release of Judge David Wilson’s sentencing judgment in the District Court in December.
Police found notes that Gould had prepared telling Borgas what to say. Wilson’s judgment lays bare the ugly truth behind the man who operated the tax fraud even as he revelled in his role in the Sydney Anglican church and his lifelong friendships with church leaders.
Gould “is as delusional as he is dishonest,” Judge Wilson found.
For decades, Gould had maintained the separate worlds in which he lived – his personal life, his public life and his secret life. But in 2013 the narrative arcs of his parallel worlds began to intermesh.
The most obvious side of his public life was his new Facebook page. Here he had begun writing about aspects of his Christian faith, which was more charismatic and faith healing than mainstream Anglican, more Hillsong than St Andrew’s.
Like the evangelism mission to the Philippines he joined in late May of that year, which targeted police officers. “A great privilege to share God’s love with them & His purposes in their lives,” he wrote. Or the Bible verse he posted in July, telling his Facebook friends, “Everything I have is but a gift from God”.
Accountant Vanda Gould after his release on bail in 2013. He blamed his arrest on “troglodyte ideologues”. Rob Homer
On August 7, he was musing on Facebook, “Glenn Davies accepting his nomination as Archbishop of Sydney last night. Praise God. Hard to believe I used to be his fellowship leader. Maybe the tables will be reversed again when we get to heaven?”
Gould’s private world was less heavenly. In April 2013 he took his parents’ longtime housekeeper to court in a futile bid to retrieve a gift they had given her – in the process alienating his father, whom he put into a nursing home, claiming incorrectly he was suffering from dementia.
Meanwhile, Gould was facing disaster in his secret life.
Since the early 1990s, Gould had been operating Hua Wang Bank Berhad, a company he set up in Samoa. His tax clients parked money there before he loaned it back to them so they could claim interest payments as bogus tax deductions.
But the big money was in trading Australian shares tax-free through a network of companies operated by London accounting firm Lubbock Fine.
The Tax Office had frozen $30 million of shares in Australia, and another $100 million cash in a UK bank account, but Gould claimed all of this belonged to Peter Borgas, a Belgian intermediary in Neuchatel, Switzerland.
More than 30 offshore companies in Samoa, the UK, the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands were ultimately controlled by Borgas, through two Cayman Islands companies, JA Investments and MH Investments.
But in September 2011, Cayman authorities Lj produced documents for the ATO which “showed that it was Mr Gould who owned JA Investments and MH Investments and that Mr Borgas’ ownership of them was a front,” Justice Nye Perram would later find.
Despite furious legal attempts to discredit the Cayman documents, in 2013 Gould was facing an uphill battle in a legal challenge involving five of the offshore companies, including Hua Wang Bank. The case would go to trial before Justice Perram in September.
Coaching sessions
In April 2013, while Gould was fulminating in court against what he saw as the greed of his parents’ housekeeper, he was also telling Borgas that he would have to come to Sydney to testify. He would tell Borgas what to say, Judge Wilson said.
“You say what we want you to say and you will be taken care of,” Gould told Borgas, Judge Wilson found. Gould sent Borgas a question and answer document to show Borgas what he needed to tell the Federal Court.
Gould called Borgas’ court appearance “the exam” and the Q&A documents – there would be at least six versions of them – were “crib notes”, Judge Wilson found.
Then there were Skype sessions, when Gould would coach Borgas what to say in court. An audio recording of one session “resembled a class between a tutor and his pupil,” Judge Wilson noted.
Gould hadn’t realised the AFP was tapping four of his phones. On June 6, 2013, days after the Philippines mission, Gould was coaching Borgas again how to make little asides: “They’re the sort of comments you can make and say, ‘Well, I might have, you know. If I had all my notes I could answer you, but I haven’t got them all’.”
On July 13 that year he was telling Borgas: “The critical thing to see is that your best answer will usually be yes or no. The more elaboration opens the door for more questions ... Please understand that the ATO wants to believe you are just a puppet for me.”
But Borgas really was Gould’s puppet, Judge Wilson found.
On August 8, the day after his Facebook post about Archbishop Davies, Gould was on a Skype session with Borgas, who was complaining about the number of companies he had to memorise. “No, no, no,” Gould told him. “Now listen to the question. Most of the companies you don’t personally own.”
The Hua Wang Bank trial began on September 13, 2013. Borgas flew in to Sydney on October 4 and was taken to his hotel by Gould’s personal assistant. He met with the lawyers representing the offshore companies. They warned him not to speak to Gould, who was ostensibly not a party to the action. Despite this Gould and Borgas spoke multiple times.
After his first day on the witness stand on October 10, Borgas told Gould: “We really need to sit together and discuss.”
After a meeting in Borgas’ hotel room, Gould called John Leaver and told him: “One issue with his I’ve just worked through with him, what to say and how to handle it, which he’ll be ready for tomorrow.”
On Monday, October 14, the phone taps caught Gould telling Borgas during the lunch break: “No, no, no, in the end it’ll be worth your while, just trust me, it will be worth your while. But I mean I – just the clearer, the crisper you are in answering, like ‘I don’t know’ and all that sort of stuff well.”
The coaching helped Borgas explain tricky issues, such as the donations from the offshore companies – $1 million to Moore Theological College, and $1 million more in other church gifts.
Why would Borgas give money to a church he didn’t belong to, on the other side of the world? “I am a Christian first, a Protestant second and a Lutheran third,” Borgas told the ATO’s barrister, Des Fagan SC.
But despite all the practice, Fagan eviscerated Borgas on the stand. Justice Perram would later find: “With this, as with almost all of Mr Borgas’ evidence, I am satisfied that he was lying.”
Borgas says Gould told him, while he was on the way to the airport, “with regard to you being compensated, John [Leaver] and I had a figure of a hundred thousand in mind,” Judge Wilson said.
Despite Gould’s comments, no allegations have been made about Leaver, who was never charged and whose companies received a $15 million tax assessment.
‘The worst case I have ever come across’
When the AFP arrested Borgas, they found “a problematic document” as Justice Perram noted later. It was Gould’s crib notes. The tax charges were dropped seven months later. But in December 2014, Justice Perram released a damning judgment on the Hua Wang Bank case.
The evidence that Gould controlled the entire offshore enterprise was “overwhelming because he went to great lengths to conceal his role, but these lengths, as events have transpired, have proved insufficient and the whited sepulchre exposed for what it is”.
Perram called it “the worst case I have ever come across in my entire career”.
For all that, Gould might have stayed out of jail, but in April 2016 Borgas flipped, telling AFP officers how Gould had coached him to give false evidence. Gould was charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice. He was found guilty in November 2019, with his delayed sentencing in December 2020.
Gould continued to proclaim his innocence, claiming that his “advice” to Borgas was “taken out of context”, prompting Judge Wilson to conclude he was delusional.
Wilson sentenced Gould to three years and four months in prison, with a non-parole period of 20 months for his “determined and fervent intent to achieve the sole outcome of attempting to pervert the course of justice”.
At his appeal on April 7, Gould’s lawyers will argue that Wilson erred in directions to the jury. The DPP is also appealing, claiming the sentence was inadequate. The story continues.