Crown Resorts chair, chief executive likely to face long questioning over potential tax underpayment

Crown Resorts’ top brass is about to get grilled on its potential underpayment of tax for almost a decade.

Crown Resorts’ top brass will front Victoria’s investigation into the casino giant next week, with its potential underpayment of tax for almost a decade set to come under the spotlight.

The royal commission is determining whether the company should keep its gaming licence for Crown Melbourne after last year’s NSW Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority inquiry uncovered damning evidence of money laundering at the venue by Asian ‘junket’ tours with links to organised crime.

It emerged last month that chair Helen Coonan, who emerged from the lengthy NSW probe largely unscathed, first heard about the tax headache in February but directors only became aware of it on June 7 at a scheduled board meeting.

Ms Coonan is among eight Crown executives so far scheduled to testify at the royal commission’s final hearings next week along with non-executive director Jane Halton — one of the few board members also left standing after it was gutted in a “renewal” process.

New chief executive and former Lendlease boss Steve McCann is also slated to give evidence.

Crown chair Helen Coonan fronted the NSW ILGA inquiry and will testify again next week, this time for the Victorian royal commission. Picture: Supplied

The inquiry has heard the potential tax underpayment could be up to $272m.

The focus this week has been frequent suspicious credit card transactions by Chinese patrons in exchange for gambling chips at the Crown Melbourne hotel reception, with fake invoices issued for hotel rooms that did not exist as part of what commissioner Raymond Finkelstein lashed as a “fraudulent scam”.

In partly closed hearings on Friday, Crown’s senior legal counsel Jan Williamson was grilled about the practice, which involved China Union Pay cards and apparently ceased several years ago.

Counsel assisting Meg O’Sullivan suggested on Thursday the only reason it stopped was because Crown staff were arrested in 2016 in China, where gambling is illegal on the mainland.

Ms Williamson said it could have been later, but she didn’t know much about it.

“The Chinese government had put out a thing about China Union Pay but it was post the detentions, 2017 I think it might have been, that China Union Pay was no longer to be used for gambling purposes,” she said.

Commissioner Raymond Finkelstein has questioned whether Crown has genuinely turned over a new leaf, saying recent reform efforts came as regulators and state governments breathed down its neck. Picture: James Ross/AAP

“It’s very difficult to put all this together when you’re now confronted with what it was ... and ... what I knew.”

“I knew it was something Josh (Preston, former chief legal officer) had said we weren’t going back to.

“It may have had something to do with currency restrictions ... but I didn’t know how it operated or what the process was.”

Commissioner Finkelstein baulked on Thursday at the idea Crown could not have been aware it was a target for money laundering and infiltration by criminals, suggesting “they simply didn’t care”.

“In other words, we’re not going to interrupt the flow of revenue ... if we break a few laws, bad luck,” he said.

He questioned whether Crown had genuinely turned over a new leaf, saying its recent reform efforts had been in the context of various regulators and three state governments “breathing down” its neck.

“They’re fighting for their lives. What choice do they have?” the former Federal Court judge asked.

A separate royal commission in Western Australia is determining whether Crown is fit to hold a gaming licence for its Perth venue, where there has also been evidence of money laundering.