Actor Paul Hogan, best known as the star of the “Crocodile Dundee” film triology, has been formally linked to court proceedings involving Australia’s largest-ever investigation of tax fraud.According to the newspaper The Australian, a string of nearly two dozen companies associated with Hogan, his financial adviser Anthony Stewart and his artistic collaborator John Cornell, have been cited in federal court relating to an alleged $300-million fraud.
Hogan has repeatedly denied any problems with the Australian Taxation Office, writing to the same paper last year and saying that he was not under investigation for failing to disclose $40 million in offshore trusts. "You got me. Almost,” the paper quoted Hogan as saying. “The last problem I had with the ATO was in 1972 when they claimed I had fudged the overheads on my earnings from my pub chook raffles.”
Dubbed Operation Wickenby, the joint Aussie investigation into illegal tax schemes is being run by the ATO and the Australian Crime Commission. The agencies want to enter documents seized from an accounting firm into federal court that detail the transactions of two men -- one a financial advisor and the other an offshore resident who used to live in Australia.
The names of the two men have been suppressed in court, and the pair are asking that anyone who has seen the documents and is involved with Operation Wickenby be removed from the case, claiming that the documents were obtained unlawfully.
