Perth Glory owes $1m in tax, according to the ATO liquidation claim

Perth Glory owner Ross Pelligra is facing a claim from the ATO that the soccer club owes close to $1m in unpaid taxes. Picture Dean Martin

New Perth Glory owner Ross Pelligra will need to stump up almost $1m to the tax office if he wants to stave off court-ordered liquidation, in the latest setback for the trouble-plagued club.

But rather than some historic debt owed by the football club as a holdover from its previous management, the problem seems to be a simple failure to make Glory’s GST and PAYG payments to the ATO.

Margin Call revealed on Monday that Glory was facing court-ordered liquidation at the hands of the tax office.

At the time Glory director Jason Bontempo told us the ATO legal action was the first time the club had heard of any problems, and that he suspected the tax office had been sending its correspondence to Pelligra’s Melbourne offices rather than to the Glory’s headquarters in Perth.

Shortly after Margin Call published, however, the club put out a public statement saying it “suspected that this issue maybe related to the previous ownership, as Perth Glory Football Club has not received any formal notice from the Australian Taxation Office related to the matter”.

So what’s the story? Well, documents released by the Federal Court on Wednesday don’t make it exactly clear. But the ATO is claiming Perth Glory Football Pty Ltd – owned by Pelligra – owes $946,879.55, including penalties and interest, for “amounts due under the BAS provisions as defined in subsection 995-1 (1) of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997”.

That could include GST payments, as well as pay-as-you-go taxes for staff, fringe benefit tax payments and deferred company tax.

Curiously enough, a look at the last set of accounts from the liquidator of Tony Sage’s Okewood, Glory’s previous owner, suggests the company was handing over about $150,000-$190,000 a month in PAYG to the tax office until Pelligra took over.

And the first liquidator’s reports said Okewood owed no money to the ATO.

Whatever the source of the problem, the tax office appears to have lost patience in mid-September, sending a letter of demand to the registered office of Glory’s owner in the Melbourne suburb of Keilor.

Which, according to the ATO, went unanswered. Leading to the wind-up application.

To be fair, Pelligra’s property development empire is a sprawling affair with projects all over the country. (He also owns the Adelaide Lightning Women’s National Basketball League club – but is looking to sell after racking up substantial losses).

It is entirely possible the Glory paperwork got lost in an in-tray somewhere, although Margin Call does wonder how nobody else in accounts noticed that no PAYG payments were being made – if that is, in fact, what happened.

What was going on behind the scenes? Bontempo wasn’t saying on Wednesday, but said it was all, as expected, an administrative error and the “immaterial matter will be resolved as soon as possible”.