The five co-offenders were each convicted of one count of conspiring to dishonestly cause a loss to the Commonwealth, contrary to s135.4(3) of the Criminal Code, and one count of conspiring to deal with the proceeds of crime being $1 million or more contrary to s11.5(1) and s400.3(1) of the Criminal Code.
Phoenix financial services lauren accountant trial#
There were 31 witnesses called at the trial including witnesses from the AFP and ATO with expertise in forensic accounting and tax analysis.
The Prosecution case in the latest Elbrus trial lasted over six months with CDPP prosecutors presenting approximately 70 hours of surveillance recordings and 28,000 pages of documentary evidence. The ATO and AFP worked side by side to piece together the entities being liquidated substantially assisted by the AFP’s use of covert recording devices at key offices used by the offenders. The SFCT looks at a range of financial crimes but particularly crimes relating to COVID-19 stimulus measures, phoenixing, cybercrime against the tax and superannuation systems and offshore tax evasion. The CDPP is one of nine Commonwealth agencies that are part of the SFCT which was set up in 2015 to tackle the most serious forms of financial crime. The subsequent arrest and trials arose from Operation Elbrus which was a joint investigation carried out by CDPP partners the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Taxation Office as part of the ATO-led Serious Financial Crimes Taskforce (SFCT). Between 20, the conspirators were able to collect over $140 million in PAYG and GST and caused a loss to the Commonwealth of over $105 million.
The scale of the fraud was so large, in covertly recorded conversations the conspirators themselves described it as “the biggest thing since Ben Hur” and one commented “if this was fully uncovered… it would be the biggest tax fraud in Australia’s history”. The agreement was that these subcontracting companies would be periodically phoenixed, with new subsidiaries created, to avoid ATO attention and allow the scheme to continue.
These subsidiaries had straw directors who were installed to conceal that the entities were in fact controlled by the conspirators. The conspirators planned for the parent company, ‘Plutus Payroll’, to appear legitimate while the subsidiary ‘subcontracting’ companies would process the payroll and retain the PAYG and GST liabilities. This trial found five co-offenders, Adam Cranston, Lauren Cranston, Dev Menon, Jason Onley and Patrick Willmott, conspired to funnel workers’ payroll through various ‘subcontracting’ companies and then siphon off, for their own benefit, the money that was to be paid to the ATO as PAYG tax and GST. On 21 March 2023, after an 11-month trial which included 23 days of jury deliberations, the verdicts for a core group of the conspirators were delivered in a large-scale tax fraud and money laundering conspiracy trial prosecuted by the CDPP in the NSW Supreme Court. In total they defrauded the Commonwealth of more than $105 million, but by 2016 the ATO and AFP were onto them and now eight offenders have served or are serving prison sentences, while five others are awaiting sentence, following successful prosecution by the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions. The story of one of Australia’s largest and most complex criminal tax fraud enterprises is almost complete after years of the conspiracies operating, blackmail by co-offenders, a subsequent AFP/ATO investigation including surveillance and finally numerous prosecutions by the CDPP.įrom early 2014 a group of offenders conspired to skim taxes that were to be paid from Australian workers and companies to the ATO for their own benefit.
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