Whistleblower group will work with Aussies over Mara’s alleged tax evasion

The National Oversight and Whistleblowers (NOW) will be lodging reports with Australian authorities to investigate Majlis Amanah Rakyat (Mara) for possible tax evasion and money laundering in its purchase of four Melbourne properties between late 2012 and early 2013.

Its director Akmal Nasir will travel to Australia next week to lodge the complaints with the relevant authorities, as NOW says Malaysian authorities will continue dragging their feet over the issues that it raised regarding the purchases.

“Any transaction in Australia which tries to hide the real price can be investigated for tax evasion and money laundering,” NOW’s co-director Rafizi Ramli said in a press conference today.

He said that the total money allegedly “swindled” by Mara officials over the four purchases stood at RM129 million.

Rafizi also said that NOW would reveal next week the identities of individuals involved and details of how the transactions went through.

Akmal will be in Australia from July 10 to July 14 to lodge these reports.

Rafizi added that NOW had been working with journalists from Australia’s Fairfax Media since February to uncover the scandal.

It started with one of Dudley International House’s developers, who is Malaysian, being dragged to court by a contractor over unpaid payments.

“The developer went into receivership and then the court started looking at the documents and realised something was wrong,” he said.

“This was when the journalists from Fairfax Media came in.”

This was followed by a meeting with NOW in March, in which both parties agreed to collaborate, with The Age making the first expose about the purchase of The Dudley.

Rafizi then made exposes regarding the three other property purchases: 333 Exhibition Street, 51 Queen Street and 746 Swanston Street.

NOW previously revealed that two of the purchases were made using offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands, while another two were made using “layered companies” in Labuan, Singapore and Australia. – July 2, 2015.