Australia’s longest and most expensive tax fraud investigation started in a Melbourne hotel room
AUSTRALIA’S longest and most expensive tax investigation that led to a criminal probe of Paul Hogan and jailing of music entrepreneur Glenn Wheatley had its genesis in a Melbourne hotel room.
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AUSTRALIA’S longest and most expensive tax investigation that led to a probe of Paul Hogan and jailing of music entrepreneur Glenn Wheatley had its genesis in a hotel room in Melbourne.
It was in February 2004 that two officers from the Australian Crime Commission raided the $4000-a-night presidential suite of accountant Philip Jepson Egglishaw of Swiss firm Strachans SA.
They didn’t find Egglishaw — who later fled Australia and is believed never to have returned — but recovered a mobile phone, passport, files and significantly the Englishman’s laptop, which contained an extensive list of wealthy clients and the use of offshore trusts to allegedly avoid paying tax.
Under the alleged scam the taxable income of a company or individual was sent offshore to pay for an invoice for a service, held in secret bank accounts and trusts and then returned via international credit and debit cards.
That raid sparked what would be dubbed Operation Wickerby — and later rebranded Project Wickerby in 2005 — a more than decade long investigation into offshore tax evasion that brought together the ACC, the ATO, federal police, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions.
The operation officially ended in June 2015 resulting in $2.29 billion in tax liabilities raised and $985.67 million in outstanding revenue recouped.
The investigations also led to dozens of arrests and convictions for tax evasion, including its first scalp, Wheatley, the former manager of Australian music legend John Farnham.
The Wickerby probe pioneered a model for tax investigation that has been copied internationally but up until Thursday it had failed to claim its biggest scalp in Egglishaw, the man dubbed the “bowler hat Englishman”.
In 2013 Hogan, who had settled a tax case with Australian authorities, launched legal action in the US alleging Egglishaw had stolen more than $34 million of his money.
But in a rare statement, Egglishaw denied any wrongdoing. “The accusations made in the media that I or my firm have stolen or innapropriately dealt with client funds are completely false and vehemently denied,” he said.
In April 2013 the Mail on Sunday tracked down Egglishaw in Geneva where he was living in a five-storey apartment block, its ground floor occupied by a police station but he refused to comment further.
A month earlier Egglishaw’s partner at Strachans, Philip de Figuerido was jailed for two-and-a-half years after pleading guilty to three counts of conspiring to defraud the Australian government of more than $4 million in tax including helping Wheatley dodge paying tax.
De Figueiredo, who has since returned to Jersey, had his jail time reduced after becoming an informant to the ACC and has agreed to give evidence against his former boss, Egglishaw.