X owner Elon Musk, one of the wealthiest people on the planet, tweeted on Wednesday: “Just to be super clear, I am not donating money to either candidate for US President.”
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THEY’RE DOING PRETTY WELL AT SINKING SHIPS, FOR A COUNTRY WITHOUT A NAVY: Ukraine Claims to Have Sunk Another Russian Warship in the Black Sea. “A modern Russian coastal warship has been swarmed by drones and sunk, Ukraine claims, the latest strike against the dwindling Black Sea Fleet.”
This bodes poorly for a Chinese Taiwan invasion fleet.
The financial watchdog has launched an investigation into corporate bookmaker bet365 to assess whether it’s been compliant with anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing laws.
The Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC) confirmed the investigation on Thursday morning as part of a supervisory campaign of the broader corporate bookmaking sector.
Any contravention of the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006 will result in the English gaming giant facing millions of dollars in penalties and other regulatory crackdowns. Bet365 is the second international wagering giant with a presence in Australia to face an AUSTRAC probe. Entain, the owner of Ladbrokes and Neds in Australia, is awaiting the outcome of a similar investigation into its operations launched last year.
The maximum fine for breaching the Act is $22 million.
AUSTRAC chief Brendan Thomas said wagering groups must have robust systems in place to manage the risk of money laundering and terrorism financing.
“Businesses without adequate processes in place to manage those risks leave themselves vulnerable to exploitation by criminals,” he said in a statement.
The regulator issued rival gambling giant Tabcorp a $45 million penalty in 2017 after a similar investigation, which exposed 108 contraventions of the anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing laws over a five-year period.
It was the highest ever civil penalty in corporate Australian history at the time.
Bet365 and Sportsbet, the biggest bookmaker in Australia, were told to appoint external auditors to assess their compliance with the anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing laws as part of a separate direction from AUSTRAC in 2022.
The 180-day audit was charged with examining the compliance programs of each wagering business. The regulator said at the time it was putting the whole wagering industry “on notice”.
Entain’s AUSTRAC investigation followed a $29 million penalty it paid to the UK regulator, the UK Gambling Commission.
Bet365 declined to comment because the investigation is ongoing.
Bet365 investigated in anti-money laundering probe
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Sydney’s rich getting richer: How do incomes in your suburb stack up?
Income has become more concentrated in some of Sydney’s wealthiest regions including the eastern suburbs, inner city and inner west during the past decade, while in the western suburbs the distribution of earnings has remained relatively stable.
Analysis of personal income by the Bureau of Statistics shows the top 1 per cent snared a bigger share of earnings in Sydney’s eastern suburbs than any other city region – 20.2 per cent, up 2.1 percentage points over the decade to 2020-21. The top 10 per cent of earners in that area now take home 48.1 per cent of all income (up from 46.5 per cent a decade ago).
The Ryde region had the city’s biggest increase in earnings going to the top 1 per cent in that period; up 2.5 percentage points to 14.2 per cent. In the inner west, the 1 per cent’s share climbed from 10.3 per cent to 11.3 per cent in the decade.
But across much of western Sydney the share of income accruing to the top 1 per cent of earners was largely unchanged. In the Blacktown district the top 1 per cent earned only 4.7 per cent of all income in 2020-21, the lowest share of any Sydney region (up 0.2 percentage points over the decade).
Terry Rawnsley, an urban economist at KPMG, said structural changes in Sydney’s economy, especially the boom in knowledge intensive services such as finance and IT, had been a key driver of income disparities across the city.
“The clustering of those businesses and workers in and around Sydney’s CBD has meant more and more income accumulating in those areas,” he said.
“A lot of that income is subsequently rolled into assets like property or shares and the effect compounds over time. As incomes go up, housing in those inner-city suburbs becomes more expensive, and they start to lose the lower end of the income distribution which is priced out. And hence, over time you get a skew to the top end.
“In western Sydney, there’s much more of a diverse population because the housing market makes it easier for different income cohorts to remain.”
Sydney’s highest and lowest incomes
The bureau’s analysis revealed huge differences in financial resources across the metropolitan area with the average personal income in Sydney’s best-paid suburbs almost five times higher than the lowest paid.
Woollahra in Sydney’s inner east had the city’s highest average personal income of $209,607 followed by the nearby harbourfront suburbs of Rose Bay-Vaucluse-Watsons Bay ($202,212) and Bellevue Hill ($200,348).
Auburn North in Sydney’s central west had the city’s lowest average personal income at $44,283. It was one of 12 neighbourhoods in western Sydney with an average personal income below $50,000 in 2020-21.
The average personal income across Greater Sydney was $80,159 – nearly $10,000 more than the national average ($70,522).
Sydney was Australia’s most unequal capital city with the top 1 per cent of earners snaring 12.2 per cent of all personal income across the metropolitan area in 2020-21, up from 11.7 per cent the previous year. Nationally the top 1 per cent received 9.8 per cent of personal income.
Rawnsley said industry composition contributed to higher income concentration in Sydney compared to other parts of the country.
“The bulk of ASX 200 companies are based there, and it’s a big financial and insurance hub for the Asia-Pacific, so you’ve got a lot of very high-paying jobs in Sydney,” he said. “You just don’t find as many of those jobs in, say, Adelaide, Perth or Brisbane. ”
Where 1 per cent have biggest income share
Eastwood in Sydney’s inner north-west had the city’s highest percentage of total income going to its top 1 per cent of earners, at 35.5 per cent in 2020-21. (That was the second-highest share in Australia after Cottesloe in Perth where 50.2 per cent of income went to the top 1 per cent.)
Next highest in Sydney was Woollahra where 30 per cent of the suburb’s income went to the top 1 per cent of earners followed by Bellevue Hill (27.2 per cent) and Rose Bay-Vaucluse-Dover Heights (26.5 per cent).
In the western Sydney neighbourhoods of Hasselgrove-Plumpton, Glendinning-Dean Park and Bidwill-Hebersham-Emerton the best paid 1 per cent earned 3.6 per cent of income, the lowest share across the city.
How concentrated is income in your suburb?
This map shows the percentage of total income earned by a suburb's residents in 2020-21 that went to the top 1 per cent of earners in that suburb.
Notes: Suburbs with fewer than 1000 income earners have been excluded. Personal income is an individual's gross income before tax and deductions.
Postcodes and spending power
Separate postcode level data published by the Tax Office highlights enormous differences in spending power across Sydney. The combined income of earners living in Mosman (postcode 2088) was $3.88 billion in 2020-21, the highest in NSW.
The Mosman postcode area had 19,706 taxpayers with an average personal income of $196,984.
Total income by postcode, 2020-21
This map shows the combined income of all income earners in a postcode in 2020-21. Postcodes with a low combined income show up as light green, while areas with a high combined income show up as dark green.
Note: Postcodes with fewer than 1000 income earners have been excluded. Personal income is an individual's gross income before tax and deductions.
The highly populated Liverpool postcode (2170) had almost three times more earners than Mosman (56,824) but a smaller total income at $3.34 billion.
The south-western suburb of Claymore (postcode 2559) which has a relatively small population and modest average earnings, had a total income of only $63 million