“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.”
— Loren Eiseley
Whistleblower Brendan Lyon’s court win clears path to challenge big four liability shield
Former KPMG whistleblower Brendan Lyon has won a court ruling that could expose Australia’s most powerful audit and consulting firms to hundreds of millions in uncapped damages…
The scandal has claimed the scalps of KPMG’s leadership and partners, including chairman Martin Sheppard, chief executive Andrew Yates, head of audit Julian McPherson, Mr Rogers and Ms Lawry, as well as Ms Hoggett who was former chief operating officer.
All up, Allens could not substantiate 10 claims the whistleblower made.
Among the allegations were that KPMG partners covertly recorded confidential conversations, including discussions with Telstra’s group financial controller, and circulated the recordings internally; that advisory partners shared confidential, market-sensitive information with audit teams during live audit tenders; and that members of the Optus audit team were present in the bid room when KPMG was pitching for Telstra.
“They were actively leveraged to provide intelligence, including detailed insights into the Optus audit approach, data analytics routines, sector-specific challenges, operating models, and business rhythms,” the whistleblower alleged, according to the Allens report.
FinCEN Permanently Ends Beneficial Ownership Reporting Requirements for Millions of Small Business Owners
Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network(FinCEN) is issuing a final rule that permanently removes the requirement for U.S. companies and U.S. persons to report beneficial ownership information to FinCEN under the Corporate Transparency Act. The final rule is effective on its publication in the Federal Register.
FinCEN today also announced that it will delete previously reported information by U.S. persons—now exempt from the reporting requirements—from the beneficial ownership information database. Under the final rule, foreign entities that are reporting companies will still be required to report beneficial ownership information for foreign individuals.
- Treasury Is Deleting Ownership Records as The Heritage Foundation’s Russian-Oil Money Trail Comes Into Focus
- Casey Michel @cjcmichel – Treasury torched one of the most important anti-corruption laws passed in a generation — and announced it’s deleting the records. The Trump administration just made it official: it’s demolishing the US’s shell company registry, and destroying all of the data it already collected. A disaster for US anti-corruption efforts. Creating this new shell company registry a couple years ago was the single-greatest anti-corruption step the US had taken in decades. The Trump administration demolishing the registry is arguably the single-greatest pro-corruption step we’ve also seen in decades. And it’s not just Trump. Republican allies in Congress are trying to overturn the entire legislation that created the US’s shell company registry—and make it effectively impossible for a future administration to restore it. This is why so many “crime is down” headlines are so tone-deaf. We’re currently living through the golden age of white-collar crime—and it’s only going to get worse.
- Dean Blundell: “The Corporate Transparency Act wasn’t some bureaucrat’s pet project. It was a LAW, passed by a bipartisan Congress at the end of 2020 — passed, in fact, over Donald Trump’s veto. Congress looked at Trump saying “no” to financial transparency and said, “Overruled.” Republicans and Democrats together decided America would no longer be the world’s favorite laundromat for dirty money. Why? Because for decades, experts ranked anonymous American shell companies among the best tools on Earth for hiding stolen wealth. Kleptocrats, cartels, fentanyl traffickers, sanctioned oligarchs — they didn’t need the Cayman Islands. They had Delaware. A nest of LLCs inside LLCs inside LLCs, and nobody — not the FBI, not the DEA, not Treasury itself — could see who was behind them. The CTA fixed that with one simple requirement: tell law enforcement (not the public — just law enforcement) who actually owns the company. That’s the “red tape” Secretary Bessent is celebrating cutting. And who lined up against this rollback? Cops. District attorneys. Narcotics officers. A former FBI investigator who spent thirty years recovering over a billion dollars in stolen assets and watched, firsthand, kleptocrats and cartels wash money through anonymous U.S. shells into American luxury real estate. Over a hundred anti-money-laundering organizations who called gutting this law a gift to fentanyl traffickers, fraudsters, and America’s foreign adversaries. Even Congress’s own nonpartisan watchdog, the GAO, warned that killing these reporting requirements exposes America to substantial illicit finance risks. So on one side: law enforcement, national security experts, and a bipartisan act of Congress. On the other: Trump’s Treasury, repealing a statute by regulatory fiat. Whose side do you think the criminals are on?”