Former PwC Australia CEO Luke Sayers — who publicly spruiks “transparency” and “accountability” and is the president of the Carlton Football Club — has allegedly made false statements about his involvement in the tax leaks scandal.
The Australian Taxation Office has revealed it told Sayers in August 2019 he should “personally review the internal emails” — in one of at least three meetings held between him and the ATO’s second-in-charge, Jeremy Hirschhorn.
The explosive revelations are despite public claims from Sayers that he was “not aware of the confidentiality issues that have since emerged within the international tax practice at PwC”.
Those claims from Sayers are despite him having been PwC Australia CEO from 2012 to mid-2020 — and so in charge at all relevant times of the tax leaks affair.
The ATO has provided the Senate with a 13-page “timeline” in relation to the scandal, made public last night, that reveals Hirschhorn also met with Sayers in February and April of 2020.
PwC has been caught selling top-secret government data to multinationals seeking to rip-off Australians by avoiding corporate tax, with revelations dozens of PwC bosses and staff worldwide were aware of the illegal activity, spanning back to 2014.
The scandal became public in January this year.
On May 2 the scandal erupted further when a heavily redacted 144-page cache of internal PwC emails was made public by the Senate inquiry into consultancies.
The emails, from 2013-18, showed...
Welcome to Reality Check, NewsGuard’s nonpartisan newsletter that tracks the false claims and conspiracy theories that shape our world — and who’s behind them. A note to readers: We just scored a b...