Carlton president Luke Sayers has been cleared by his old firm over claims that he had given a travel company a special deal with PwC.
The top tier consultancy firm investigated claims made by a whistleblower in February.
But on Friday, PwC wrote to Mr Sayers saying he was in the clear.
The company declined to comment but it was understood that the whistleblower’s complaint was taken seriously.
However, PwC did not find there was evidence that Mr Sayers had done anything wrong.
While Mr Sayers was running PwC, he was accused of helping Hello World get the firm’s lucrative travel account.
It was alleged that as a result of that deal he was given access to senior politicians, but PwC dismissed those claims.
Mr Sayers ran PwC for almost a decade and has been grilled in a Senate inquiry over what he knew about the firm selling secret government advice for profit.
PwC had to sell its government consulting arm, worth up to $1 billion, for $1 after those claims were made public.
Mr Sayers has denied he knew about the practice. A final report has yet to be tabled.
He was granted an extra year as Carlton president at a club meeting earlier this year.
Some members asked questions about the PwC scandal but he won the vote with an overwhelming margin.
Columbian-born Alejandro 'Alex' Mendieta Blanco
Jetsetting jewellery dealer Alex Mendieta-Blanco was famous for having Delta Goodrem at his party. But he was also convicted of a scam worth up to $1bn. This is how his empire worked.
All day long, couriers weighed down with backpacks full of gold caught the lift up to playboy jewellery dealer Alex Mendieta-Blanco’s office on the 11th floor and returned to ground level lighter – and richer.
The task, a simple part of a complex web involving high-speed gold dealing, stolen jewellery and vast claims for tax refunds, was lucrative.
Runners were paid $500 a kilo – a fraction of the $77,000 a kilo the precious metal is worth but enough to make some extremely wealthy.
“It was like Pulp Fiction,” one person who regularly sold gold at the nondescript office building in the Melbourne CBD said.
“I would put up to 40 kilos of gold in a backpack, and then walk 15 metres and sell it again.”
Colombian-born Mendieta-Blanco made enough money from slinging gold to enjoy a luxurious lifestyle full of fast cars, designer brands and first-class travel.
At his peak, before he was handed four months jail for receiving stolen goods in 2020, the Melbourne-based businessman even hired pop star Delta Goodrem to play at his birthday party.
While Mendieta-Blanco pleaded guilty to receiving $29,000 worth of stolen gold jewellery, the true scale of his business empire, which had close links with a large-scale GST scam, was far larger.
Documents obtained by the Herald Sun show that in 2016 Mendieta-Blanco’s company Sell Your Gold, which traded as Gold Buyers Melbourne, turned over $64.4m worth of gold – more than twice the $25.7m it turned over the previous year.
Large quantities of gold flowed
through Mendieta-Blanco’s office,
bought and sold in a pattern of
circular transactions that often
occurred on the same day,
Administrative Appeals Tribunal
documents show.
The flow was boosted by
“off the books” gold in the shape
of stolen jewellery, according
to prosecution documents filed
with the Victorian County Court
as part of Mendieta-Blanco’s guilty plea.
Audio and video surveillance cameras
set up as part of an elaborate
investigation led by the head
of Victoria Police’s elite anti-bikie
Echo Taskforce, Gary Measham,
revealed that profits were also
boosted by “skimming” – deliberately
underpaying customers who brought in
stolen goods.
Industry sources estimate that
Mendieta-Blanco personally
reaped about $20m from the
business.
One source told the Herald Sun
they often sold Gold Buyers
Melbourne between 10kg and 20kg of
the precious metal a day.
The source said Mendieta-Blanco
regularly kept about $1m cash
on hand in a drawer full of $50 bills.
“The amount of money there – f**k me,”
the source said.
When police raided the office in
October 2017, they seized jewellery,
gold and cash worth $1.9m, company
documents show.
In AAT proceedings in which a company
that bought gold from Mendieta-Blanco’s business,
Sell Your Gold, sought to overturn a Tax Office
decision denying them the benefit of input tax credits,
the ATO alleged the rapid fire gold transactions
were part of a bigger scheme that ripped it off by
almost $9.5m in dodgy GST refunds in 2016.
At the time, GST fraud in the gold trade was rife,
with the total cost of the scam across the industry
estimated to have stung taxpayers by between $700m
and $1bn by the time it was shut down by the then
financial services minister, Kelly O’Dwyer, in June 2017.
The rort relied on the fact that GST is payable on “scrap” gold
jewellery but not on pure gold bullion such as bars or coins.
Participants in the scam bought gold that they falsely claimed
was scrap and refined it, then claimed a credit for GST they
never paid.
But in an AAT ruling in January, evidence from Mendieta-Blanco
that much of the gold he bought and sold was actually
melted down from jewellery helped defeat part
of the ATO’s $9.5m claim.
Under interrogation by tax officers, Mendieta-Blanco
said sellers brought gold bars into the office in
messenger bags and backpacks.
The bars were “just deformed and ugly
with … (a) little borax and stuff” left over from
gold smelting, he told the ATO.
A source close to the criminal investigation into
Gold Buyers Melbourne said this was because
the bars included stolen jewellery that was
melted down.
Mendieta-Blanco was originally charged with
450 counts of receiving stolen goods, but by the
time he pleaded guilty in July 2020 the charges had
been whittled down to one of receiving stolen goods
and one of possessing cocaine, which was dropped
on the courthouse steps.
He received four months jail while his brother, Julio,
who also worked in the business, was spared
time inside and an employee, Chey Tenenboim,
got 12 months.
The jail time doesn’t seem to have done too
much harm to Alex Mendieta-Blanco’s life.
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After getting out he was poised to buy a superyacht with the influencer girlfriend of banned Gold Coast property spruiker Jamie McIntyre, but the vessel sank before the deal went through.
After moving to Barcelona, he now bills himself as an entrepreneur and philanthropist “who is passionate about using his fortune to help people all over the world”.
He didn’t respond to questions emailed to the contact address on his personal website and texted to his Australian
mobile phone number.
Theft, scams and backpacks of gold: Inside playboy Alex Mendieta-Blanco’s empire