The Pandora Papers: How the world of offshore finance is still flourishing | Four Corners

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ELISE WORTHINGTON: This is a story about a parallel universe,
where the super rich
hide eye-watering amounts of money around the world.
GERARD RYLE: We're talking about presidents,
we're talking about prime ministers,
we're talking about rock stars, we're talking about porn stars
and people that have been convicted of crimes all over the world.
Their methods are usually highly guarded secrets.
But, hidden in an elaborate paper-trail,
they're now exposed for all to see.
ANTHONY WATSON: It's a shell game.
They hide the assets, they hide the income,
they hide the real beneficial owners.
To unscramble these incredible structures that you find,
it takes a really long time.
The keepers of these secrets are lawyers and accountants,
who work through a global network of trusts and shell companies
based in tax havens around the world.
LAKSHMI KUMAR: Without checks, gatekeepers have carte blanche
and are able to ride roughshod over the financial landscape
with no questions really asked and no accountability.
They pay the fine, and then it's just business as usual.
JOHN CHEVIS: I think some of the best money's to be made
if you're willing to turn a blind eye to who you're dealing with
and where their money might've come from.
I think there's very good money to be made, sadly.
DEBRA LAPREVOTTE: You have a handful of people
who loot the resources of a country.
Imagine the good that could have been done with $5 billion.
The roads, the infrastructure, schools, medicine,
education, healthcare.
All of that could've been
and all of that was taken away by a handful of people.
The private fortunes of the rich, famous and sometimes infamous
are concealed through lucrative financial holdings
and expensive real estate,
and Australia has become a prime destination
for them to stash their cash.
PETER WHISH-WILSON: I think the outrage
that would be expressed by Australians
if they knew that corrupt money
was buying their local jewels in the crown
and competing against locals at auctions,
I think they'd be furious about that.
NATHAN LYNCH: In real terms, that means that your children or yourself
might be going to buy a property,
and, when they're at auction,
there could be a person there in a suit
looking very, very sharp and legitimate,
but they could be a proxy
acting for a foreign kleptocrat or a politically exposed person.
Tonight on Four Corners
we investigate how politicians, criminals and the super-wealthy
move millions through a parallel economy
open only to those who can afford it.
And we reveal how an Australian accountant made a fortune
helping high-risk clients keep their riches away from prying eyes.
Our investigation begins in Singapore.
This glittering island financial hub
is an ideal place to set up complex business structures.
PETER WHISH-WILSON: Their corporate tax rate of 17%
has always been traditionally much lower
than other foreign jurisdictions.
So, that's attractive to companies
that want to go set up business there and pay less tax.
And, of course, if you're going to go to the effort
of setting up a headquarter in a country like Singapore
and you're a big multinational firm
and you're involved in profit-shifting activities
and a whole range of other things
that are certainly immoral and unethical,
then what you're going to also demand from the Singapore government
is layers of regulations to hide your identity and what you're doing.
It's actually a recipe for setting themselves up for scandal.
For the last 40 years
Singapore has been home to a little-known business
run by an Australian accountant named Graeme Briggs.
He set up his company, Asiaciti, here in the 1980s.
(ELEVATOR DOOR DINGS)
Today, it's a global business with clients on every continent.
GERARD RYLE: It's one of the largest offshore service providers
in the world.
And it's actually run by an Australian man.
They have all sorts of legitimate clients,
big banking, big banks,
big accountancy firms.
Asiaciti essentially sets up offshore companies
for people who want privacy.
Asiaciti is part of a growing industry
of professional wealth managers
helping the super rich manage their cash.
LAKSHMI KUMAR: It's lawyers, accountants, investment advisors.
You know, so, anyone that helps with the private equity,
venture-capital fund, real-estate agents.
All of them are gatekeepers.
And when we use the term 'gatekeepers', it really...
..is these are the individuals
that are meant to guard the financial system,
because they have the expertise,
they have the know-how to navigate the nitty-gritties
of what is otherwise a very complex system to navigate.
What we've found when we've looked into it
is that individual entities
that are providing these services,
for them in isolation
it's hugely profitable.
So, you know, there's the ongoing advice.
There's the fees of setting up these structures.
There's a trailing revenue model
because you're continually managing these structures.
So, for those individual businesses that are active in this space,
it's hugely profitable.
Asiaciti prides itself on trust and discretion,
keeping the confidential information of its high-profile clients secret.
Now an anonymous source has leaked millions of internal documents
from Asiaciti and 13 other offshore providers
to media around the world
through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
GERARD RYLE: It's interesting that we're seeing
somebody who no-one's ever heard of.
You're talking about Graeme Briggs -
an accountant, somebody who's gone to Singapore, built a business,
and now he's centre of what will be, I think,
a political storm around the world.
Graeme Briggs is a 75-year-old grandfather
with a taste for the finer things in life.
He owns a multimillion-dollar mansion
on a vineyard in the Mornington Peninsula.
Graham lives in Victoria. He collects art.
He likes fine wine, particularly Italian wine.
He also collects Japanese fountain pens.
So, he's somebody with expensive tastes.
But he also mixes with people from all over the world,
very wealthy, important clients,
but also some people who are very high public figures.
The leak reveals Graeme Briggs
amassed a $62-million fortune
that includes more than $10 million in real estate,
a $4-million rare-pen collection
and $400,000-worth of fine wine.
Like the fortunes of those he's managed,
much of Graeme Briggs's wealth
is held through a complex offshore company and trust structure.
One of the trends that's emerging
in the documents in the Pandora Papers
is the fact that this offshore world lobbies behind the scenes,
it lobbies governments to allow the offshore world to take place.
So, Graham was particularly involved in turning Samoa into a tax haven.
The island nation of Samoa is a tiny speck in the ocean
halfway between New Zealand and Hawaii.
Graeme Briggs was one of the first to realise Samoa's potential
over two decades ago.
He spruiked himself as an expert consultant to the government
on offshore finance.
He set up an Asiaciti office in the nation's capital,
just down the road from the regulator.
TO'OTO'OLEAAVA DR FANAAFI AIONO: He was one of the first
to bring that type of business here to Samoa.
And I understand that he did have a say
in advising on the original legislation.
I've met him once.
In fact, I met him during one of the reviews of Samoa
in accordance with the Asia Pacific Group on anti-money laundering.
One of their reviews of Samoa back in 2014,
that was when I first met Mr Graeme Briggs.
He seems very personable.
He's not very tall.
Short, curly hair. Grey. Aussie. (LAUGHS)
It may not look like a global finance hub,
but there's tens of thousands of international companies based here -
one for every three residents.
The genesis was...
..I think it was trying to find other sources of income
that were legitimate and legal
for a small island nation with very limited natural resources.
That's basically the genesis of it.
It's a tax haven that's been criticised
for its lack of transparency
and has been blacklisted by the European Union since 2017.
In the good old days, when it was a bit more Wild West, so to speak,
there was no regulation around,
and, so, it was easier to incorporate a company,
and, as such, the risks for things going wrong
and things being used for untoward purposes
was probably higher in the early years of the industry.
ANTHONY WATSON: It's a tax haven,
which means it doesn't impose tax on a lot of income
earned by people in that jurisdiction.
And it was very popular for Australians because
before we had a regime which taxed people on their foreign income
if earned through a foreign entity.
So, if I put a foreign company in Samoa,
and that foreign company earned income outside Samoa,
it wasn't taxed in Samoa AND it wasn't taxed in Australia.
Hence the benefit of having a tax haven in the middle.
For those who consider these sorts of arrangements,
they're not clever or sexy or harmless.
I think the victims when people don't pay tax
is everyday Australians,
the millions of taxpayers
who do the right thing, who declare their income,
pay their employees and have fair competition against other business.
The leaked documents show Asiaciti kept a confidential list
of its highest-risk clients, known as PEPs.
JOHN CHEVIS: So, PEP is as an acronym
for Politically Exposed Persons,
and it's referring to people who held senior government positions.
They may be politicians, they may be heads of state-owned enterprises
or heads of government departments.
And they may be foreign or domestic.
The reason they are singled out and considered high-risk
is because people who are in those positions
have in the past availed themselves
of the opportunity to commit corruption offences.
The documents reveal
hundreds of millions of dollars of Asiaciti's clients' money
has been ploughed into the booming Sydney property market.
Two luxury apartments in this city tower
were purchased by a Sri Lankan, Thirukumar Nadesan,
whose wife is a member of the country's ruling Rajapaksa Family.
He is currently facing corruption allegations.
The ownership of the apartments was hidden using a shell company
registered in Samoa and managed by Asiaciti.
PETER WHISH-WILSON: Australia is seen
as an easy place to park your money
if you're a criminal, if you're corrupt,
if you want to launder money.
More Australians out there, more battlers
who are trying to buy their first home
are going to be competing in an increasingly unaffordable market
against potential billionaires or tycoons in foreign countries,
some of them involved in corruption.
In another secretive offshore set-up managed by Asiaciti,
a Singaporean company called Bright Ruby Resources
spent nearly $300 million on two office towers in Sydney's CBD
and bought Sydney's iconic Hilton Hotel
in 2015 for $442 million.
Documents in the leak reveal the six layers of companies and trusts
between Bright Ruby
and its ultimate owner, Chinese steel billionaire, Du Shuanghua -
one of Asiaciti's highest-risk clients.
PETER CAI: He really become quite famous in 2008
when he become the second-richest man in China
according to the Hurun List,
which is kind of similar to our AFR Rich List.
In fact, there was a bit of a story about, you know,
he fought off to become the richest man in China.
He actually, I think, persuaded the editor to change that
because in China is always not a great idea
to become the richest billionaire
because a lot of things tend to happen to them
after they top the rich list.
Controversy has dogged Du Shuanghua
since he admitted to a closed court in China in 2010
that he'd bribed a Rio Tinto executive millions of dollars.
He admitted to paying one of Rio Tinto employee
about nine million in US dollars as a bribe to secure some iron ore.
Were you surprised when he admitted to paying bribes
but then wasn't prosecuted?
In a way, I think...
..you can almost see it as one of those American legal dramas -
you know, he'd become... agreed to become a key witness
in a way that he probably was granted immunity
from the prosecution
in that particular case.
Four Rio Tinto employees, including Australian Stern Hu,
were sentenced to years in prison over the scandal.
Du went unpunished and went on to make billions.
The leaked documents show
Du Shuanghua's history of bribery was recorded in Asiaciti's files
along with his political connections to the Chinese Communist Party.
That makes him a politically exposed person by definition,
by the anti-money-laundering standards.
I'm not surprised that someone like Mr Du can buy the Hilton Hotel
through a structure that perhaps hides the fact that he's behind it.
You have this Russian-dolls sort of arrangement
where opaque and offshore structures are used to conceal ownership.
And it becomes very difficult for an Australian bank, for instance,
to unwind that ownership structure
when we don't have things like a beneficial-ownership register
to show who are the ultimate people
sitting behind these corporate vehicles.
In this picturesque corner of North West Tasmania,
another Asiaciti client bought up farmland
using a secretive offshore trust and company structure.
ANTHONY WATSON: How the money came in
was that a Canadian executive had a fund in Bermuda.
The Bermudan fund advanced the money to a Singaporean company,
which acquired the Australian dairy farm.
But when you look at the ownership on paper,
the Singaporean company is owned by the trustees,
two trustees of two respective trusts in the Isle of Man.
Asiaciti files reveal the source of funds for the purchase
came from Canadian Stephen De Heinrich,
who was a director of international oil giant Addax Petroleum.
PROMO VOICEOVER: We are an international
oil and gas exploration and production company.
In 2007 two senior Addax executives
admitted to bribing a former Nigerian oil minister for lucrative contracts.
De Heinrich made a fortune after the company was sold for US$7 billion.
(BIRDS TWITTER, COWS LOW)
The Tasmanian farms were sold back to local owners this year
for nearly double the purchase price.
Does the Australian Government
really know who owns property in Australia?
No, probably not, and it's one of the advantages
of having opaque structures like companies.
They're both... Again, they give an air of legitimacy -
"That's owned by a foreign company, so it must be OK."
But then you get a string of companies.
And then you'll get companies who are owned by nominees,
and nominees aren't often declared.
Or there will be companies
who are controlled not by their shareholders but by their creditors.
And, so, it's hard to actually pick
where the control's actually coming from.
(BIRDS TWITTER)
Tasmanian Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson
sat on a recent senate inquiry into foreign ownership.
He says it raised serious questions
about the Foreign Investment Review Board's ability to properly monitor
the flow of money into Australian property.
PETER WHISH-WILSON: See, arguably,
an estimated billions of dollars flow into Australian real estate
that's dirty money.
And that money pushes up house prices.
It makes houses less affordable for your average Australian.
And it's certainly not good enough
that the government knows there are flaws in our legislation,
there are exemptions that need to be removed,
or loopholes - is probably a better word for it -
that need to be removed,
yet they drag their feet in doing this.
Now, what that means
is, in real terms, that means that, you know,
your children or yourself
might be going to buy a property,
and, when they're at auction,
there could be a person there in a suit
looking very, very sharp and legitimate,
but they could be a proxy
acting for a foreign kleptocrat or a politically exposed person.
Now, because there's no regulation
of any of the gatekeepers in that transaction chain,
that poses a huge risk to Australia.
And I think, you know, the outrage
that would be expressed by Australians
if they knew that corrupt money
was buying their local jewels in the crown
and competing against locals at auctions...
..yeah, I think they'd be furious about that.
The secrets of companies like Asiaciti rarely become public
unless someone decides to take the massive risk
of leaking confidential documents.
GERARD RYLE: The source wanted two things.
First of all the source wanted anonymity.
I presume for safety reasons.
And the second thing is that I was told
that he wanted to make these documents available
to governments all over the world.
And this was the best way of doing it, by going to journalists.
Gerard Ryle has spent the last decade chasing the secrets of the super rich
through tax havens around the world.
I keep coming back to it has to have public interest.
We're not interested in someone's private affairs.
But when we're looking at these records,
we're not looking at private affairs,
we're looking at things that should be made public.
I think what it shows, really, is that there is a shadow economy,
a shadow world out there that we are not aware of,
and that this is a world that is enriching
the people who are already rich.
He's coordinating a team of more than 600 journalists
from international media partners, including Four Corners,
who have spent months analysing more than 11 million documents.
Asiaciti is just one of 14 service providers in the leak.
When you're looking at a secret world,
you obviously have to get information from that secret world
to really understand it.
I think all of the leaks we've had in the past,
they've only given us a small window into this world,
but here we have 14 separate windows.
And I think that's what's allowing this
to be different from anything we've done before,
because it's allowing this breadth of information.
We're able to see how the world really works,
how this parallel universe really works,
in a way we've never been able to before.
Inside the Pandora Papers
are files on politicians,
world leaders and former leaders
and their secret wealth.
Jordan's King Abdullah II,
who bought luxury homes
worth up to a US$100 million
through secret offshore companies.
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis,
who secretly used shell companies to buy a French chateau.
And Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta,
whose family secretly owned offshore assets worth more than US$30 million.
We're talking about Myanmar generals.
We're talking about people associated with Robert Mugabe
over in Zimbabwe.
And we're also looking at some other African figures,
people that have been convicted or accused
of money laundering or even worse crimes.
(SIREN WAILS)
Some of Asiaciti's clients
have been on the radar of authorities for years.
In 2014
Asiaciti was instructed to freeze the assets
of one of its high-risk clients.
The order was obtained by the US Department of Justice.
FBI agent Debra LaPrevotte was chasing massive amounts of cash
plundered by a former Nigerian president.
DEBRA LAPREVOTTE: President Abacha died in 1998,
and it's alleged
that, during his presidency,
he stole, embezzled, extorted...
..just shy of $5 billion.
So, in 2012, the FBI and the Department of Justice got together
and we started to investigate these funds.
And what we found is there was a network of individuals
that were not only helping President Abacha get his hands on these funds,
mostly in cash,
but then those funds had to be moved out of Nigeria.
In 2010
Asiaciti set up offshore trusts
for a long-time associate of the President,
Nigerian politician Abubakar Atiku Bagudu.
It was later alleged in court documents that the pair had:
Asiaciti kept Bagudu on as a client regardless.
Once, in 2013, when it became very public
that Mr Bagudu was listed in the US complaint,
they could have said, "You know what?
"There's enough here that causes us pause,
"so we're going to go ahead and close this account,"
or, you know, "request that you are no longer our customer."
That didn't happen.
The FBI is still hunting more than US$170 million
frozen in trust accounts linked to Bagudu.
Bagudu denies any wrongdoing and is contesting the freezing order.
It is extremely frustrating.
And, again, it comes back to these known havens, right?
Whether it was Vanuatu, Singapore, Caymans, Switzerland at the time.
You have a handful of people who loot the resources of a country,
whether it's oil-rich Nigeria, oil-rich South Sudan,
resource-rich Congo.
And, yet, frequently,
a great percentage of the population is living below the poverty level.
Imagine the good that could have been done with $5 billion
in Nigeria in the late '90s.
The roads, the infrastructure, schools, medicine,
education, healthcare.
All of that could've been
and all of that was taken away by a handful of people.
Russia is one of the world's most high-risk and high-reward
financial destinations.
It was a lucrative source of clients for Graeme Briggs and Asiaciti.
One of the people that Briggs cultivated was Herman Gref,
a former Putin minister
and head of a Russian state-owned bank
that was later sanctioned by the US and Australia.
JOHN CHEVIS: So, the meeting occurred in a cafe
in Moscow in February 2015
between Graeme Briggs, the head of Asiaciti,
and Herman Gref,
who was a senior, well, politically exposed person in Russia.
And they were meeting
to discuss the structure that Asiaciti had set up for Herman Gref
and the fact that he was going to use this structure
in his post-government role or his post-government life.
So, the fact
that the bank that Herman Gref is heading up is being sanctioned
I think is significant.
Asiaciti helped set up an offshore network for Herman Gref
and one of his old government colleagues,
Putin's former deputy chief of staff, Kirill Androsov.
He spoke to Four Corners from Singapore
where he's now a fund manager.
Yes. I met Graeme.
At the very beginning I met Graeme.
I think at the month of integration of the fund.
Because, for me, it was important
who will be the administrator of the fund
and what is the attitude of this company.
The fact that they're Russian isn't necessarily a red flag,
but the fact that they were Russian politically exposed persons
and that some of them
had had allegations of corruption around them.
Some of them were very closely linked to the Russian government,
senior levels of the Russian government.
And then seeing large volumes of money
being moved in a circuitous pattern -
that is a distinctive red flag.
(SIREN WHOOPS)
The leaked documents reveal that Kirill Androsov
received a mysterious US$25-million bonus payment
from a Russian businessman with rumoured links to organised crime.
Asiaciti failed to keep track of millions of dollars of transactions
in the complex Russian structures.
Money-laundering expert John Chevis has reviewed the documents.
It's worth noting that these weren't insignificant amounts of money.
We were talking about $25 million at a time
for some of these transactions.
There were the circuitous transactions
between these three... these three people.
Whether they were conducting those transactions themselves
or whether someone was conducting them on their behalf,
they didn't appear to have any legitimate economic reason
for some of these transactions that were occurring.
The transactions of Asiaciti's Russian clients
were later investigated by the Singaporean regulator,
which delivered a damning report.
Well, they found that Asiaciti's anti-money-laundering systems
were very lacking, they were lacking in many ways.
They suggested that the policies and processes weren't in place,
and that those policies and processes that WERE in place
weren't being followed properly.
Androsov categorically denied
that any of his commercial dealings are in any way improper or unlawful.
He told Four Corners he continues to work with Asiaciti.
As far as I know, they still have a licence.
And as long as they are licenced, they are liable to operate.
I don't know the details of this case and I don't know the substance.
We keep business in some of the aspects
and we stopped business in some of the other aspects,
but I don't think that it's connected with this case
that Monetary Authority of Singapore announced against of them.
Last year the Monetary Authority of Singapore
fined Asiaciti $1.1 million
for failing to adequately monitor its high-risk clients
and "multiple, and in some cases systemic, lapses"
in anti-money laundering controls.
You have to ask yourself, "Why is somebody in this business?
"Why is somebody running a trust company out of Singapore,
"where they've been found to be delinquent in their...
"..vigilance to fight anti-money laundering and terrorism financing?"
So, you know, I could only say that I'd have to question...
..he knows what his company's doing -
I would want to know,
"Has anything changed since they were audited and fined?"
The fine was so minimal.
I mean, it's less than a slap on the wrist.
Revenue authorities around the world, the big revenue authorities,
are aware of the scale of what the professional enablers do
and the scope of their reach.
So, they formed various joint task forces
to try to combat hidden income, hidden assets
and the whole camouflaging of beneficial ownership
by the enablers.
Australian authorities
have been trying to track offshore tax evasion for years.
In 2006
the ATO launched the biggest tax-fraud investigation
in Australia's history.
It was dubbed Project Wickenby.
WILL DAY: So, Project Wickenby was, I guess,
the first time that we brought together a multi-agency focus
on offshore tax evasion.
We raised well over a billion dollars
in liabilities,
in tax that wasn't paid and additional penalties.
VANDA GOULD: My name is Vanda - V-A-N-D-A, Gould - G-O-U-L-D.
One of its targets was a Sydney accountant
who was a client of Asiaciti.
His name is Vanda Gould.
And I'm presently at Long Bay Corrective Centre, at the jail.
Vanda Gould spoke to Four Corners from prison.
He was arrested on tax-fraud charges in 2013.
I was at home. I was... I was...
..I think doing some exercise on the exercise bike.
And, I mean, I was, you know...
And then we had all these Commonwealth Police came in
and sort of did a raid at the house.
Vanda Gould met Graeme Briggs in the mid-'80s
and began doing business with him in the early '90s.
I met Graeme Briggs and we got chatting.
I'm having a chat to him. It wasn't a very long call, this discussion.
And then subsequently
he took it upon himself to make contact with me.
You know, when you talk to him,
he's a genuinely decent sort of human being.
Asiaciti's Samoa office had come up with a lucrative new product.
It was pitched as a Samoan superannuation scheme.
Briggs wrote to Gould explaining how it worked.
"Western Samoa has no taxation treaty with Australia,"
therefore it offers "complete exemption
"from all forms of income tax"
and provides "absolute secrecy and confidentially."
Gould put his clients' money into Asiaciti's offshore super funds.
'Cause, essentially, their office provided all the support staff.
So, they actually established the super fund.
They got the lawyers to actually prepare the deeds.
They got every transaction that was entered into.
They were, you know, integral to those transactions.
(BIRDS TWITTER)
Asiaciti's Samoan super scheme had a brilliant twist.
Clients were able to access their money before they retired
via loans from the super fund.
ANTHONY WATSON: Well, the temptation for tax, if you want to avoid it,
is to set up a Samoan fund,
have your employer settle some money on it,
and then the income of the Samoan fund,
the theory was it was not taxable in Australia.
So, the income of the fund can be earned tax-free in Samoa.
But if you want to get it back to Australia, though,
we did have rules, like all super funds,
that if you got a payment on death, disability,
a certain age being reached or retirement,
you were taxable on it.
So, the answer is don't get a payment for any of those reasons,
rather, get a loan.
Loans in any form of tax jurisdiction aren't taxable.
So, if I loan you money, you're not taxable on the amount I give you.
It's not income. It's not a gain.
You haven't benefited at all, you've just borrowed from me.
So, in this case, they simply...
..the Samoan fund would loan the money
back to the Australian resident.
But the Tax Office had some questions about Samoan super schemes.
In 2010 it issued a public warning
saying the schemes were being used to conceal income or assets
and that so-called loans from them may be a sham.
WILL DAY: What we would do in those sorts of arrangements
is ask some questions -
"Well, if this is truly a commercial loan,"
for example,
"where are the documents that sit behind that loan?"
"What interest rates are being paid?"
"Show us where your repayments are going."
"What have you invested that in?"
And often, where these arrangements are purely non-commercial,
they're unable to answer those sorts of questions.
The taxpayer alert just is like a siren that says, "We're watching."
It didn't change the law.
The taxpayer alert just highlighted
that the Tax Office was aware
that certain people were doing certain things.
Gould's tax-fraud charges were eventually dropped,
but he was later jailed for perverting the course of justice
for coaching a witness to lie.
Gould's clients were ordered to pay back
more than $300 million to the ATO.
My job is to actually
help taxpayers get through the labyrinth of the Australian Tax Act
in the most effective way.
And if one of the most effective way means they reduce their taxes,
well...well, so...so be it.
I don't think there's any morals in it.
The leaked documents
show Graeme Briggs was questioned by Australian authorities
while they investigated Vanda Gould's Samoan operation.
Briggs was never charged or accused of criminal conduct.
Vanda Gould still supports him.
No, no, no, I mean, I don't to have any hard feelings against...
..against, you know, Graeme.
But...you know, just watch this space.
God will ultimately vindicate me.
I think that the first thing to always bear in mind
is that most people do the right thing,
and there's nothing illegal with holding money offshore
provided that it's declared to the Tax Office,
and most people do do the right thing.
While Graeme Briggs has retired to his vineyard outside Melbourne,
Asiaciti continues to do business in tax havens around the world.
In a statement Asiaciti said:
The problem with the offshore world
is that it's up to the service providers to regulate themselves.
There are rules that are set down by governments,
but there's no one government overseeing it.
There's no sheriff here.
And, so, when you're living in this sort of parallel universe
where there is actually no government oversight to speak of,
it's extremely important that these firms follow the rules.
In 2016
the original Panama Papers leak
caused global outrage about offshore secrecy.
The federal government committed to a beneficial-ownership register,
which would force the true owners of corporate structures to be disclosed.
It still hasn't happened.
PETER WHISH-WILSON: We've been campaigning
for at least five years now
to get a public-beneficial-owners register.
Australians have a right to know
who is buying their land,
their sovereign wealth,
their future.
I'm not going to get into any arguments
about whether foreign investment is good or bad,
but, bloody hell, our laws should be good.
Accountants and lawyers
who do a lot of the set-up, a lot of these structures,
for illicit funds
aren't required to even provide any detail to regulators
around who is the ultimate beneficial owner
of this particular investment.
There's no real reason for that,
except for that these industries,
like the accounting profession and the legal profession,
have lobbied very ferociously in Canberra.
This reticence to set up a beneficial-ownership registry
therefore undermines the efforts of Australia's allies
to actually plug the problem and check the problem.
But what happens is,
if you allow the trend to continue
and you allow the country
to be...to essentially be a destination for illicit wealth
that buys up land, buys up real estate,
when you start becoming a destination
for criminal money and ill-gotten money,
there's the question of what other problems
are you bringing in with it as well?
Is it going to be just the money? Because it's never just the money.
It's estimated up to a tenth of the world's wealth
is parked in offshore financial centres,
costing governments hundreds of billions of dollars
in lost tax revenue each year.
There's increasing calls
for Australia to strengthen regulations
governing this parallel world.
NATHAN LYNCH: We are woefully behind the times.
So, of all the financial-action task-force members around the world
that haven't complied with all of the obligations
around gatekeeper professions -
that's the US, China
and then you're talking about countries like Madagascar -
and then on that list of countries you have Australia.
So, we've really dropped the ball in this area.
WILL DAY: Look, most lawyers, accountants and other professionals
do do the right thing.
It is relatively easy to be tempted
to get involved in offshore tax arrangements.
My message to them
is don't facilitate lying, cheating and stealing
from other Australians.
You will soon find yourself over your head in these arrangements.
They're not clever. They're not harmless.
They victimise the entire Australian society.
Captions by Red Bee Media
Copyright Australian Broadcasting Corporation