Tax transparency: full list of exempt companies revealed as Senate battle looms
Private companies that were given a historical exemption from filing annual financial reports are run by a who’s who of corporate Australia, including Malcolm Turnbull
Private companies associated with Australia’s business elite, including prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, are on a list of entities not required to publish tax information under a historical secrecy provision that will continue if the Senate caves in on its demand that the government introduce new tax transparency rules.
Guardian Australia can reveal the full list of 1,498 companies that were – as of 2011 – exempt from filing annual financial reports with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (Asic) under a deal done by the Keating government in 1995.
The list is a who’s who of corporate Australia, including private companies associated with the Myer family, the Pratt family’s Visy Industries, media proprietor John B. Fairfax, Transfield Holdings, News Corp subsidiaries Courier Newspaper Operations and General Newspapers Pty Ltd, chicken producer Inghams, the Moran Health Care Group, construction giant Grocon and pastoral companies such as S Kidman and Co, currently up for sale.
Some companies on the list have ceased to exist or are dormant, including one of Turnbull’s former companies – Allcorp Property Services, through which he ran a cleaning business with the late Neville Wran.
Turnbull and Partners Holdings Pty Ltd that ran the investment bank he established with Wran and Nick Whitlam, later sold to Goldman Sachs, is also on the list.
A spokesman for Turnbull said on Monday night Turnbull and Partners Holdings had been used for other investments more recently, but the prime minister would now write to ask that it be removed from the Asic exemption list.
Those companies on the list and continuing to operate, and which now have an annual turnover of more than $100m, were about to have details of their annual revenue and the tax they pay published by the tax commissioner under separate laws passed by the former Labor government.
Having originally failed to block the government’s bill removing the requirement, the Senate has now inserted it into a separate bill on multinational tax avoidance – a move the government has rejected – setting the scene for a showdown in the Senate on Tuesday.
Negotiations were continuing on Monday night with the Senate crossbenchers whose votes will determine the issue, but the revelation of the list reveals which companies could be forced to publicise information for the first time.
Asic has recommended the exemption be removed and the Treasury has long opposed it, but no government has tried to change it since it was introduced in 1995 during a legislative overhaul.
Only companies that existed in 1995 and met all the criteria in the law at that time can use the exemption and no new companies can be added. That means, for example, that private companies belonging to the mining magnate Gina Rinehart are not on it.
Being on the list does not imply a company has done anything wrong, but it does mean the company is not subject to the same requirements to file information as other similar firms.
For decades no one has necessarily known that information about these companies.
Mark Zirnsak of the Tax Justice Network
“Those companies on this list which have more than $100m in turnover now are the ones who would benefit from the secrecy law passed by the government to stop the tax commissioner from publishing their revenue and the tax they pay,” said Mark Zirnsak of the Tax Justice Network.
“For decades no one has necessarily known that information about these companies.”
While the existence of the exemption is no secret and some of the companies on the list have been previously named, the full list has not been published.
The tax office said of the former government’s transparency laws: “The first objective of [the laws] is to discourage large corporate tax entities from engaging in aggressive tax avoidance practices. The second objective of these amendments is to provide more information to inform public debate about tax policy, particularly in relation to the corporate tax system.”
The Senate is now proposing to reintroduce the transparency obligations for big companies, while providing an avenue for firms to apply to the tax commissioner for an exemption on a case-by-case basis.
The company would need to convince the commissioner “that to make the information publicly available may be significantly prejudicial to any of the entity’s current or future commercial negotiations”.
In a written statement of reasons for rejecting the amendments, the government said it would be inappropriate to require the tax commissioner to make such decisions.
“The tax office is not equipped with the expertise to assess the commercial sensitivities of company negotiations,” the statement said. “The Senate amendment would require the ATO to divert resources away from its core activities, which is not in the public interest.”
