This is a story about a parallel universe where the super rich hide eye-watering amounts of money around the world. We're talking about presidents, we're talking about prime ministers, we're talking about rock stars, 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.
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. Without cheques, gatekeepers have caught 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. I think some of the best money is to be made. If you're willing to turn a blind eye to who you're dealing with and where their money might have come from, I think there's very good money to be made, sadly. 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, health care. All of that could have been, 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.
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. 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. The 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 a layer of or 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 Graham Briggs. He set up his company Asia City here in the 1980s. Today it's a global business with clients on every continent. It's one of the largest offshore service providers in the world.
It's actually run by an Australian man. They have all sorts of legitimate clients, big banking, big banks, big accountancy firms. Asia City essentially sets up offshore companies for people who want privacy.
Asia City is part of a growing industry of professional wealth managers helping the super rich manage their cash. It's lawyers, accountants, investment advisors, you know, so anyone who 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. Asia City 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 Asia City and 13 other offshore providers to media around the world through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. It's interesting that we're seeing somebody who no-one's ever heard of. You're talking about Graham Briggs. An accountant, somebody who's, you know, gone to Singapore, built a business, and now he's at the centre of what will be, I think, a political storm around the world.
Graham Briggs is a 75-year-old grandfather with a taste for the finer things in life. He owns a multi-million 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 Graham 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 Graham Briggs'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. Graham 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 Asia City office in the nation's capital, just down the road from the regulator. She 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 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. Graham Briggs. He seems very personable. He's not very tall.
Short, curly-haired, grey, Aussie. 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 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... 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 taxes 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 Asia City kept a confidential list of its highest-risk clients, known as PEPs. So PEP is 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 Asia City'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's currently facing corruption allegations. The ownership of the apartments was hidden using a shell company. registered in Samoa and managed by Asia City.
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 Asia City... 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 Asia City's highest risk clients. He really became quite famous in 2008 when he became the second richest man in China according to the Hurin 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 it's always not...
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 a Rio Tinto employee about $9 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? You know why? I think it kind of, you can almost see this, he won his American legal dramas.
You know, he 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, was 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 Asia City'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 northwest Tasmania, another Asia City client bought up farmland using a secretive offshore trust and company structure.
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 land. 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. Asia City files reveal the source of funds for the purchase came from Canadian Stephen De Heinrich, who was a director of international oil giant Adax Petroleum. We are an international oil and gas exploration and production company. In 2007, two senior Adax executives admitted to bribing a former Nigerian oil minister for lucrative contracts. De Heinrich made a fortune after the company was sold for 7 billion US dollars.
Adax Petroleum, maximising value for all. 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'll 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. Tasmanian Green Senator Peter Wish-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.
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 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 Asia City rarely become public unless someone decides to take the massive risk of leaking confidential documents. 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, 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. Asia City 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 have 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 100 million US dollars through secret offshore companies.
Czech Prime Minister Andrzej Babiš, 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 30 million US dollars.
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. Some of Asia City's clients have been on the radar of authorities for years. In 2014, Asia City 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 Deborah LaPrevotte was chasing massive amounts of cash plundered by a former Nigerian president. President Abacha died in 1998, and it's alleged that during his presidency he stole, embezzled, extorted just shy of five billion dollars. 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, Asia City 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 systematically embezzled public funds worth billions of dollars. Asia City kept Bagudu on as a client regardless. Once in 2013, when it became very public that Mr. Bagudu was listed in the U.S. 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're no longer our customer. That didn't happen. The FBI is still hunting more than 170 million US dollars frozen in trust accounts linked to Bagudu.
Bagudu denies any wrongdoing and is contesting the freezing order. It's extremely frustrating, and again, it comes back to these known havens, right? Whether it was Vanuatu, Singapore, Cayman, 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 five billion dollars in Nigeria in in the late 90s. The roads, the infrastructure, schools, medicine, education, health care, all of that could have been, 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 Graham Briggs and Asia City.
One of the people that Briggs cultivated was Herman Greff, a former Putin minister and head of a Russian state-owned bank that was later sanctioned by the US and Australia. So the media... It occurred in a cafe in Moscow in February 2015 between Graham Briggs, the head of Asia City, and Herman Gref, who was a senior, well, politically exposed person in Russia. And they were meeting to discuss the structure that Asia City 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.
Asia City 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 Graham at the very beginning. I met Graham.
I think the months of incorporation 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.
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. Asia City 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 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 Asia City's Russian clients were later investigated by the Singaporean regulator, which delivered a damning report.
Well, they found that Asia City'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. And Drosov categorically denied that any of his commercial dealings are in any way improper or unlawful. He told Four Corners he continues to work with Asia City.
As far as I know, they still have a license, and as long as they have a license, 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 stop business in some of the other aspects, but I don't think that it's connected with this case that the Monetary Authority of Singapore announced against them. Last year, the Monetary Authority of Singapore fined Asia City $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 I could only say that I would 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've 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.
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, it wasn't paid, and additional penalties. My name is Vander, V-A-N-D-A, Gould, G-O-U-L-D. One of its targets was a Sydney accountant who was a client of Asia City.
His name is Vander Gould. And I'm presently at Long Bay Corrective Centre at the jail. Van der Goold spoke to Four Corners from prison. He was arrested on tax fraud charges in 2013. I was at home. 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... Raided the house.
Van der Goold met Graham Briggs in the mid-80s and began doing business with him in the early 90s. I met Graham Briggs and we got chatting and having a chat to him. It wasn't a very long call, just 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. Asia City'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 confidentiality. Gould put his clients money into Asia City's offshore super funds. Essentially their office provided all the support stuff 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 integral to those transactions. Asia City's Samoan Super Scheme had a brilliant twist.
Clients were able to access their money before they retired via loans from the Super Fund. 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... It can be earned tax-free in Samoa, but if you want to get it back to Australia, 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.
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 ways means they reduce their taxes, well, so be it. I don't think there's any morals in it. The leaked documents show Graham Briggs was questioned by Australian authorities while they investigated van der Goel's Samoan operation.
Briggs was never charged or accused of criminal conduct. Van der Goel still supports him. No, no, no. I mean, I'm not going to have any hard feelings against, you know, Graham.
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 Graham Briggs has retired to his vineyard outside Melbourne, Asia City continues to do business in tax havens around the world. In a statement, Asia City said... We are committed to the highest business standards, including ensuring that our operations fully comply with all laws and regulations in each jurisdiction in which we operate.
The regulatory and industry landscape has evolved over the course of our 45-year history, and we have worked diligently to comply with prevailing regulations through this passage of time. The problem with the offshore world is that it's up to the... It's up to these 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 very 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. 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 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. 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. 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 that 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.