Monday, January 04, 2021

First Criminal Cases from Abusive Syndicated Conservation Easements

It’s a trial with all the hallmarks of a great blockbuster movie.

Two siblings, Adam and Lauren Cranston, whose father is the former deputy commissioner of the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), along with lawyer Dev Menon and referrer Jay Onley, are on trial after pleading not guilty to being involved in scheme that defrauded the Commonwealth of more than $105 million between March 2014 and May 2017.

The Offence of Conspiracy to Defraud the Commonwealth


'Gun threat' in tax fraud

The Daily Telegraph by Carla Hildebrandt

Monday 28 December 2020

A BUSINESSMAN who admitted blackmailing members of an alleged $100m tax scam syndicate says the group's accused kingpin Adam Cranston - the son of a former deputy tax commissioner - threatened him with a rifle and sent him “deeply upsetting” anti-Semitic emails about the death of Jewish women in the Holocaust, court documents reveal.

Stunning details have come to light after Daniel Hausman entered a guilty plea, with an agreed statement of facts stating how he allegedly recruited veteran journalist Stephen Barrett to help blackmail the syndicate out of $25m.

A SYDNEY businessman who blackmailed members of an alleged $100m tax scam syndicate says accused kingpin Adam Cranston threatened him with a rifle and sent him “deeply upsetting” anti-Semitic emails about the death of Jewish women in the Holocaust, according to court documents.

 

Vatican says $2.3 billion transferred to Australia 'like science fiction'


The SEC’s “token” enforcement action against Ripple for XRP Francine McKenna, The Dig


Pope formally strips Vatican secretariat of state of assets ABC


There are lots of ways to describe the subject matter of economics, but the ponciest way is to say it’s about “the study of incentives”. It’s true, but a less grandiose way to put it is that conventional economists are obsessed by prices and not much else.

If you’ve heard someone being accused of knowing “the price of everything, but the value of nothing”, that phrase could have been purpose-built for economists. Read on and you’ll see why economists so often make bad predictions and give bum advice.

They often can’t see past the price tag

Why much of what we're told about the effects of taxes is off beam


Paul Davis On Crime: My Q&A With Legendary FBI Profiler John Douglas.

When I got to Quantico at 32, I was the youngest of all the agents. The Behavioral Science Unit had about eight or nine agents and I was assigned to teaching criminal psychology. We had road schools two weeks at a time going from one city to another. I told my partner, let’s go into the prisons and conduct these interviews of Ed Kempner, Charles Manson and David Berkowitz. We went into the prisons and conducted the interviews as I wanted to be a good instructor

 

Abusive conservation easements have been a topic on this blog for some time now.  See here.  DOJ and the IRS have noised about criminal prosecutions, but until this past week none have surfaced.  Now, we have two criminal cases with a pre-wired plea on the filing of the criminal informations.  See DOJ Press Release: Atlanta Tax Professionals Plead Guilty to Promoting Syndicated Conservation Easement Tax Scheme Involving More Than $1.2 Billion in Fraudulent Charitable Deductions , here

Relevant excerpts from the press release are:

According to court documents, from at least 2013 through 2019, S. Agee and C. Agee, then partners at an Atlanta accounting firm, marketed, promoted, and sold together with co-conspirators,  investments in fraudulent syndicated conservation easement (SCE) tax shelters. The SCE tax shelters were designed to produce tax deductions for high-income taxpayers through partnerships that purported to make “real estate investments.” In truth, the partnerships were a sham, lacking economic substance and serving no legitimate business purpose. The placement of conservation easements over the real estate was a foregone conclusion, which fraudulently enabled the investors to shelter their income from the IRS with no economic risk and to claim substantial tax deductions to which they were not entitled. S. Agee, C. Agee, and their co-conspirators marketed the SCE tax shelters by promising investors that for every $1 invested in the partnership, the investor would receive more than $4 in charitable tax deductions. 

First Criminal Cases from Abusive Syndicated Conservation Easements



Fifth Circuit Denies Rehearing En Banc in Controversial Client Identity Privilege Case 

I have previously reported on the Fifth Circuit’s rejection of the client-identity privilege (a subset of the attorney-client privilege) in Fifth Circuit Rejects Attorney-Client Identity Privilege for Law Firm Documents (Federal Tax Crimes Blog 4/26/20), here.   See Taylor Lohmeyer Law Firm P.L.L.C. v. United States, 957 F.3d 505 (5th Cir. 2020), here.

On December 4, 2020, the Fifth Circuit denied rehearing en banc.  The vote was 9 to 8.  Six of the judges dissenting to denial of rehearing en banc filed a dissenting opinion.  The denial and dissenting opinion are here.    

The panel opinion was controversial.  Amicus briefs on petition rehearing en banc were filed by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, here, and by the American College of Tax Counsel, here.  


UK Taxman in 'staggering' failure to prosecute evaders 



Govt urged to focus on tax avoidance promoters


HMRC fails to deliver on pledge to increase criminal prosecutions by end of 2020, FOI request reveals