Article in The Age Claiming Euro Pacific had a ‘Long History of Non-Compliance’

‘Long history of non-compliance’: US celebrity’s offshore bank suspended

Below is a pdf copy of the article originally published here:

https://www.theage.com.au/national/long-history-of-non-compliance-us-celebrity-s-offshore-bank-suspended-20220630-p5ay3g.html

This is another article replete with falsehoods, unethically published by Nine while my defamation lawsuit was still being litigated. Nine tried to use the action against the bank as part of its defense. The judge threw it out as being irrelevant. I still think McKenzie and Grieve may have pulled some strings to get the IRS to pressure OCIF into taking this action. The bank most definitely didn’t have a long history of non-compliance. We had only had one audit, and it was less than a year before this action was taken. So, at most, the bank had a short history of non-compliance, except the bank complied with everything OCIF asked it to do. Also, $700K of the $1M fine was for operating without a banking license, except the bank renewed its license on time and paid the fees. Over the following five months, no one from OCIF ever informed the bank that its routine annual license renewal was rejected.

Also, the reference to 100 Australian tax evaders was another lie. So far, not a single Australian who had an account at my bank has even been charged with tax evasion, let alone convicted. During the defamation trial, Nine was asked to name some of the 100 Australians who used my bank to evade taxes or launder money. They could not even come up with one.

It wasn’t just the lies told in this article that were the problem, but also all the truths that were omitted. The article includes all the false and irrelevant references to tax evasion and money laundering to imply that those crimes were the reason the bank was shut down. That the “long history of non-compliance” related to AML. But the article completely left out the statement from the OCIF Commissioner that the action against the bank was not related to money laundering or any other financial crimes, and that OCIF had not concluded that the bank helped customers launder money or evade taxes. That was clearly the most remarkable admission during the press conference, and Nine completely omitted it from its article, the purpose of which was to deliberately create the false impression that the bank was shut down for facilitating tax evasion and money laundering—the very crimes it had accused it of committing in its prior article, but for which it had no evidence to present in court.