PwC Australia chief executive Tom Seymour was sitting next to the company’s international tax chief Peter Collins in 2015 when he told a Senate inquiry that none of the big four firm’s 5000 employees had acted improperly.

“I have the utmost faith in the ethical standards of the people we employ,” Seymour told the inquiry into corporate tax avoidance in April 2015. “I certainly would be shocked and hugely disappointed if anyone in our firm is breaching laws.”