Chanticleer podcast (https://www.afr.com/podcast/chanticleer), James and Anthony trawl through the greatest hits of the Financial Review’s outgoing editor-in-chief Michael Stutchbury’s incredible 13-year career …
When the PwC tax saga exploded
Anthony: We wanted to look back at some of the big stories during your tenure … you came up with a list of defining stories from the past 13 years.
Now, we’ve asked you to nominate five of these – the greatest hits, if you want – and we’re going to learn a little bit more about each of them.
So I want to start with one that’s actually been dominating the best-read charts this week, and that’s the PwC tax leak scandal, which has been the subject of a five-part series by Gold Walkley winner Ed Tadros this week.
Stuch, when this story first broke, did you realise it was going to be such a monster?
Stutch: No, it was in January of last year. Neil Chenoweth broke the news, and it was a page one, but a modest sort of page one story – bottom of the page – which said that the Tax Practitioners Board, which many people probably hadn’t heard of, but it registers people who do tax, tax agents and the like, had deregistered a senior tax adviser at PwC for dishonesty and misusing confidential government information provided during consultations over devising a new anti-tax avoidance multinational tax regime.
He’d taken that information and used it to advise his own multinational clients on how to avoid the tax, and he’d been deregistered for that.
So that was quite a good story, but there it was ... it wasn’t until May that things really started to heat up.
But behind the scenes, a lot of stuff was going on, particularly with Chenoweth and Tadros working their sources – a classic case of a traditional newsroom with investigative journalists digging into the story, knowing their contacts, and getting the information out.
They got in a position to be the first to report in May on a cache of hundreds of emails that had been basically demanded by a Senate inquiry, showing the extent to which knowledge of this confidential information had been shared and turned into a potential and actual money-making exercise for the firm. And from there, the whole thing just exploded.