Canada is trying to tax its athletes more (NYT)
Migrant workers sent $650bn overseas last year – what it means
Tax fraudster Li Zhang fights the ATO from jail
The irony of the
convicted golf course developer now accusing the Tax Office of doing something
untoward is so delicious, you could serve it up at a hatted restaurant.
Max Mason
Senior
reporter
Heard the
one about the convicted tax fraudster contesting a tax bill from jail?
Golf course developer Li Zhang got whacked
in February with 10 years in prison, nearly seven on non-parole, for conspiracy
to defraud the Australian Commonwealth of $15 million. And that followed a
16-year global manhunt that took him to Hong Kong, China and then New Zealand,
where the Hightrade Group executive was eventually arrested.
When Intercontinental Hotels Group signed a
$40 million deal with Hightrade Group to build the Hunter Valley resort in
2004, it inspired high hopes for the locals.
Now, from his home at
the Geoffrey Pearce Correctional Centre in Sydney’s north-west, Li has filed a
suit against the Tax Office, citing “the suspicious timing” of a new tax bill
and a garnishee notice sent to his bank HBSC to recover the funds.
In the legal documents, Li has not revealed
how much the ATO alleges he owes, but claims that the “re-raise of
non-pursuit”– meaning the reconsideration of a debt the Australian Taxation
Office put on hold because it wasn’t practical to chase (perhaps because he
fled the country) – exceeds the six-year statute period in NSW.
The Tax Office began investigating Li’s Hightrade
Group in 2008. The ATO and Australian Federal Police raided his home in
mid-April 2009.
By the end of that month, he’d fled to Hong
Kong. It wasn’t until 2019 that he was arrested and extradited to Australia.
The ATO found that Li and two other conspirators
used several companies to inflate construction costs between them and did not
pay GST. It also claimed that Hightrade companies issued false and inflated
invoices, wrongly accruing excess GST credits, which the ATO would refund. Call
it a more sophisticated version of the TikTok-fuelled
GST refund crime wave that would cost the ATO $4.6 billion a few years later.
“The production of the literally thousands of
false invoices over many years demonstrates a utilisation of other criminality
and it enhances the seriousness of the offending,” Judge Martin Blackmore wrote
in his Hightrade judgment.
The irony of Li now accusing the ATO of doing
something untoward is so delicious, you could serve it up at a hatted
restaurant. Unfortunately for him, the correctional centre dinners won’t be as
appetising.
Related
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Max Mason covers insolvency,
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Walkley Award winner, Max's journalism has also received awards from the
National Press Club of Australia, the Kennedy Awards and Citibank. Message Max
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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.
The world’s richest countries in 2024
The Economist [unpaywalled]: “Sorting countries into rich and poor can be difficult. Measures such as GDP are affected by population size (more people generally mean more output).
But adjusting for population alone is not enough. Dollar income per person does not account for differences in prices between countries (a Big Mac, for example, will set you back more in some places than in others, even after converting into dollars). Nor does it account for productivity (overall output per hour worked). To get a fuller picture,
The Economist therefore ranks countries by three measures: dollar income per person, income adjusted for local prices (known as purchasing-power parity, or PPP) and income per hour worked. See where each country ranks below..
Private equity’s interest in audit raises red flags FT
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A booming industry of AI age scanners, aimed at children’s faces WaPo