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Monday, August 12, 2024

When the PwC tax saga exploded

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.

TikTok is expanding rapidly in Australia.

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Max Mason covers insolvency, courts, regulation, financial crime, cybercrime and corporate wrongdoing. A Walkley Award winner, Max's journalism has also received awards from the National Press Club of Australia, the Kennedy Awards and Citibank. Message Max on Signal https://tinyurl.com/MaxMason Connect with Max on Twitter. Email Max at max.mason@afr.com

 


 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


American Stasi: Tulsi Gabbard Confirms “Quiet Skies” Nightmare (no paywall) Matt Taibbi, Racket News


A booming industry of AI age scanners, aimed at children’s faces WaPo