Glenn Wheatley’s Accountant Facing 6 Years Jail For Tax Fraud

A British accountant has confessed to the Queensland Supreme Court to tax evasion, helping orchestrate an elaborate multi-million dollar scam involving some of Australia’s top entrepreneurs and celebrities, including artist manager and music industry veteran Glenn Wheatley.

As News Ltd reports, the Australian Taxation Office-led probe into Operation Wickenby experienced a major win yesterday when Philip Eric de Figueiredo pleaded guilty to three charges of conspiring to defraud the Commonwealth between 1999 and 2005, and looking to serve 6-7 years jail time for his crimes.

The 60-year-old employee of Strachans, a Swiss-based accountancy firm, helped set up the $4 million offshore tax evasion scheme, which involved the likes of Australian actor Paul Hogan, John ‘Strop’ Cornell, and the previously mentioned Wheatley.

Both Hogan and Cornell settled with the ATO ‘confidentially’, while Wheatley faced prosecution in 2007, admitting to tax evasion charges for failing to pay $318,000 to ATO and sentenced to a 15 month jail term, as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald. Telling the court at the time, “I’m ashamed of what I have done… It was something that I have regretted for a long, long time and I’m ashamed of what I’ve brought on my family, who have had to suffer a lot.”

During his trail, Wheatley’s long-term client, friend, and Aussie icon John Farnham gave the manager a glowing character reference, along with the likes of entertainer Bert Newton, AFL figure Richard Colless, and army general Peter Cosgrove.

In the Queensland Court yesterday, De Figueiredo pleaded guilty to conspiring with Wheatley to defraud the Commonwealth to cause a loss, and is facing a maximum sentence of 10 years in jail, and admitted to two similar charges over the tax evasion scheme, which has collected $351 million since 2004, well short of the $1.36 billion expected to turn up, and has cost taxpayers $430 million.

As The Australian points out, on Tuesday, the court heard that while working for Strachans, de Figueiredo set up offshore trust companies which were used to create fake records of transactions with other companies.

Crown prosecutor Alan MacSporran told the court that while de Figueiredo was not the architect of the scam, he was instrumental in it and should be jailed for between six and seven years.

“He was a professional accountant operating offshore in a position where he was breaching the trust placed in him,” Crown prosecutor Alan MacSporran told the court, “to facilitate the commission of these frauds.”

But de Figueiredo’s barrister, Phil Dunn QC, defended that his client was simply caught up in the scheme, and was not the grand architect of the tax evasion scam, “like a frog in a pot of water being heated,” as he explained to the court. “We’re not talking about someone who was a high flier.”

The accountant was first arrested in the Chanel Islands of Jersey in 2008 and extradited two years later at the request of police working on Operation Wickenby, Mr de Figueiredo has been living in Queensland on bail since 2010.