Below is a pdf copy of the article originally published here:
“The reason this article is still online is that the original judge found that it was not defamatory of me personally, just of the bank. However, under Australian law, the bank was not allowed to sue for defamation. My lawyers thought the judge got it wrong and that I likely would have won an appeal. But since I already won a judgment against The Age and was awarded more than the legal maximum for damages, there was not much point in spending more time and money on an appeal. However, the worst part of the article was not defamation, but all of the lies. Grieve and McKenzie deliberately fabricated non-existent evidence to make the bank look guilty and ignored actual evidence that proved it was innocent.
The most defamatory part of The Age article about me personally is the following:
“Like father, like son
A dislike of paying tax is a Schiff family trait. Peter Schiff’s father, Irwin, is viewed as a martyr of the tax resistance movement. He ran a business called Freedom Books from a Las Vegas shop front, selling information packages that taught thousands of Americans how to cheat the system. He died in jail for tax evasion.
Schiff has inherited his father’s love of profile. He spends hours each week recording his internet show, talking about everything from inflation and gold to the ‘fake news’ of white privilege. But while Irwin opened a bookshop, his son opened an offshore bank in sunny Puerto Rico.”
It’s clear that the “Like father, like son” headline meant that we were both criminals who helped people illegally evade income taxes. But while my father did it with a bookstore, I did it with a bank. My father went to jail for his crimes, and I would likely go to jail as well. Calling someone a criminal is definitely defamatory. But the judge didn’t see it that way. She ruled that the “Like father, like son” headline only meant that we both liked publicity. That’s ridiculous. The initial judge was promoted shortly after this ruling. The second judge was actually much better. Had I had the second judge from the beginning, I’m sure The Age article would have been ruled defamatory too.
Also, my lawyers made a mistake in that they only argued that the print article was defamatory. The online article embedded a three-minute video clip using some of the most defamatory parts of the broadcast. Had we argued the online version was defamatory, I think we would have won. In the final judgment, that three-minute video was ordered removed.
Even if the article was not defamatory, it was replete with false statements. Below is a list of 38.
- “While none of the millionaire tax dodgers targeted on January 24, including about 100 Australians, knew each other, they shared a bond: they were customers of a little-known Caribbean bank.“
There was no proof that any Australians were targeted on Jan. 24th, let alone 100 of them. Plus, there is no evidence that any of the 100 Australian customers of the bank were tax dodgers. This is a false statement.
- “He also likes to warn people about the upcoming economic apocalypse from which they can take financial refuge in his ‘privacy assured’ bank.“
“Privacy assured” was removed from the bank’s website several years before this article was written, and the bank no longer marketed privacy as a benefit. Prior to the article, I informed McKenzie that once the bank moved to Puerto Rico, all privacy and secrecy were lost. Also, the bank is not marketed to people looking to take refuge from an economic apocalypse. It is marketed solely to people who are looking for the legitimate services the bank provides and who want a 100% reserve bank for the safety of their deposits.
- “Schiff’s celebrity status is likely why some major Australian financial institutions, including Westpac and the Perth Mint, hopped into bed with the Euro Pacific Bank.“
My celebrity status had nothing to do with these companies working with the bank. I told McKenzie that I started working with Perth Mint in 2002. Hardly anyone had heard of me back then. I didn’t even do my first TV interview until 2004. My first book came out in 2007. I started my radio show in 2010, and the podcast a few years later. Also, the expression “hoped into bed” suggests a sleazy relationship.
- “The New York Federal Reserve and Canada’s Bank of Montreal both allowed their customers to transfer funds into the bank, cloaking it in an air of credibility.“
The bank was not “cloaked in an air of credibility.” This implies the bank was not actually credible, that it was a sham. This is a false statement. The bank was credible, which is why those companies did business with it.
- “Hundreds of account holders are now suspects in a tax evasion probe.“
This is false. They had no proof that any account holders were suspects, let alone hundreds. But being suspected of something does not imply guilt, as they are suggesting.
- “Among the super-wealthy Australians suspected to have sought to keep their financial affairs secret is the Sydney businessman responsible for one of Australia’s biggest tax rorts, Simon Anquetil. Other Australian account holders include Darby Angel, a Hollywood film financier with a drug-trafficking conviction.“
Anquetil’s Plutus payroll account application was rejected by the bank, and the account for an unrelated business was frozen by the bank years before his fraud became public. Second, Angel was an Australian citizen but hadn’t lived there in over 10 years. His drug-trafficking conviction occurred over 20 years in the past, and was spent. Under Australian law spent convictions are no longer publicly accesable. That means it would have been impossible for the bank to have known about it. The journalists must have found out about it through a corrupt government source. Plus, Angel never actually used the bank account, so he didn’t keep anything secret. This is false, as these “criminals” are named to falsely imply the bank did something wrong by opening their accounts. Also, the word “among” implies there were many others. These were the only two they found, out of thousands of customers.
- “Euro Pacific is still, for now, pumping suspected tax-lite dollars around the world. And in an interview, Schiff says he intends to keep it that way.“
I never said that I was going to keep pumping tax-lite dollars around the world.
- “But while Irwin opened a bookshop, his son opened an offshore bank in sunny Puerto Rico.“
This is false, as the article previously wrote that my father opened a bookstore to help people evade taxes. The implication is that I opened my bank for the same illegal purpose.
- “An empty shell that has the appearance of luxury,’ according to one Puerto Rican who worked there. ‘It was basically empty except for a few desks, chairs, and the computers.“
This has a false connotation, as 90% of the bank’s employees did not work in Puerto Rico. We had 65 employees, 30 working in compliance. Fewer than 10 of those employees worked in the PR office. We rented more space than we needed in anticipation of growth. It was a slow process. Also, during COVID, almost everyone was working from home.
- “You would have to question why someone would place their money in a jurisdiction that’s so far away, in a bank that doesn’t pay any interest, in a bank that charges enormous fees for moving your money,’ Chevis said.”
This is false. I told McKenzie why people used my bank. We charged lower fees on FX transactions than onshore Australian banks, and we were a 100% reserve bank, which provided added safety that people were willing to pay extra for.
11. “Euro Pacific’s former IT director, John Ogilvie, also had questions after working at the bank in 2014-16. Ogilvie says he was confronted with a shambolic business, lax data security, and high-risk clients. He suspected some Australians were opening up accounts to avoid the ATO.”
Ogilvie never said anything about high-risk clients. He told them that he had no knowledge about the bank’s customers. When asked about money laundering and tax evasion, Ogilvie told them that he had no knowledge of either and didn’t see any of that. It was the interviewer who said the bank sounds shambolic, not Ogilvie.
- “Ogilvie says customers from Australia and elsewhere seeking to keep their bank accounts secret were instead at risk of having their financial affairs floating around the dark web.”
Ogilvie never told them that Australians were trying to keep their accounts secret at Euro Pacific Bank.
- “Recruiting customers was a relentless job done by “onboarders.” Five of them, speaking on the condition of anonymity, claim they went through an inconsistent vetting process that ranged from a quick Google and social media check “to make sure they were a real person” to, in some cases, a more thorough series of checks.”
This is a lie. It is directly contradicted by their own notes of conversations with the onboarders who all told them how rigorous the bank’s KYC and AML compliance program was.
- “There’s a huge disconnect between what you’re taught and what you do, says one ex-employee.”
While he did say that, he also said a lot of things about how strict compliance was and how customers complained to him about how many questions he asked, and that he felt bad about having to ask so many questions. So, it’s false to offer that one isolated quote as proof the bank employees really didn’t do all the KYC and AML the same guy said he was thoroughly trained to do.
- “Euro Pacific’s anti-money laundering efforts were also viewed skeptically by some of the large companies it was courting. Mastercard rejected the bank’s application for a license around 2017 after it failed to meet anti-money laundering standards.”
This is a false statement. Mastercard never rejected the bank’s application, let alone for concerns over the bank’s anti-money laundering standards. Mastercard discontinued the program the bank applied for. They offered us another program, but it did not meet our needs, so we never applied.
- “By 2018, negative feedback about the bank was circulating online, and applications for new accounts started to dry up.”
This is false. The only real negative feedback online related to how overly strict the bank’s compliance program was.
- “By then, Ogilvie had been sacked over a disagreement with senior management. After two years at Euro Pacific, his last act was to send an email to Peter Schiff. ‘The chickens will come home to roost,’ Ogilvie wrote. ‘You will have to deal with the problems within Euro Pacific Bank Ltd. at some point.'”
This implies his email related to money laundering or tax evasion. It did not. It related to his concerns that Mark Anderson and Adrian Murray weren’t the right guys for the job and that I should reassign them to different tasks and hire more competent people to be President and Vice President, or take a more active role myself.
- “According to a source with involvement in the overseas operations of the tax probe, a leak of the account details of thousands of Euro Pacific customers opened up lines of inquiry.”
This is also not true. The bank turned over those details on thousands of customer accounts to a Sacramento Grand Jury. The only leak was someone sharing those details with The Age reporters. I think there was a leak that predated that investigation, but it only involved a few of the bank’s customers, including the guy in the Netherlands who was investigated and cleared in May of 2018.
- “Once the J5 had the information, customer names were matched against criminal databases held by police and tax agencies around the globe, along with income tax declarations. The information revealed Euro Pacific’s customers included entities linked to a who’s who of financial and organized crime.”
This is false. The bank’s customer base was not linked to a “who’s who” of financial and organized crime. “Who’s who” implies lots of criminals, basically that the majority of well-known criminals had accounts. But the only one who did was Anquetil, and the bank did nothing wrong with his account, and it was not used by him to facilitate any of his crimes.
- “Among them was Sydney businessman Simon Anquetil, the mastermind behind Australia’s biggest tax fraud, Plutus Payroll. The Plutus fraud, hatched in 2014, started as a payroll services company but morphed into a scheme that stole millions of dollars from the tax office that paid for fast cars and glitzy events graced by the likes of Miss World Australia. By the time police arrested Anquetil in May 2017, they estimated he had stolen more than $105 million.”
This is false, as it implies Anquetil used my bank to pull off the Plutus fraud. But the Plutus bank account application was rejected by my bank, and my bank rejected all four incoming wires from Plutus.”
21. “Sources say another of Euro Pacific’s account holders is Australian entrepreneur and Hollywood film financier, Darby Angel. Angel first appeared in public records in 1996 when he was convicted in the Melbourne Magistrates Court of drug trafficking.”
This is misleading as they don’t mention that he received a suspended sentence, that the conviction was spent, he had lived in Dubai for over 10 years, so had no income tax obligations to Australia or anywhere else, and that he never used his EPB account at all, as it was never funded.
- “His corporate bank account at Euro Pacific was linked to a Seychelles company created to export furniture, he says. The bank never asked him about his past, Helgason says, only lots of standard check-the-box questions. “No one at Euro Pacific Bank said: ‘Can we have a copy of your most up-to-date CV? And by the way, don’t leave anything out,’ he recalls.”
This is a complete lie. Helgason went into great detail about how surprisingly strong the bank’s customer vetting process was, and how strictly we scrutinized every transaction he made. Yet they fraudulently represented that he had told them the opposite. They ignored all the exculpatory things he said, and quoted him out of context, using a sarcastic comment about how it would have been impossible for the bank to have known about what happened to him in Thailand, to falsely report that he told them our customer vetting process was surprisingly light.
- “The FBI also linked an account at Euro Pacific to a Russian syndicate described by the FBI as the world’s worst cyber crime group.”
There was no evidence of this link anywhere in discovery.
- “It will take years for investigators to work through the bank’s thousands of customers. Some may be legitimate.”
“Some may be legitimate” implies that most were not. That is a false statement. They were all legitimate.
- “Sources aware of the overseas raids have confirmed that British tax authorities arrested a Euro Pacific client and issued warrants to several banks dealing with Euro Pacific.”
There was no evidence of this in discovery.
- “The J5 is also hunting the lawyers, accountants, and financial institutions linking taxpayers to Peter Schiff’s bank.”
There was no evidence of that in discovery.
- “One of Euro Pacific’s key Australian promoters is lawyer Patrick Flynn. He quite lawfully recommends his clients to the bank, saying its main virtue is that it refuses to automatically share information with overseas tax authorities. Flynn also promises to help keep law enforcement away from his clients’ financial affairs by using bank accounts linked to company structures in multiple offshore jurisdictions.”
This is deceptive, as Flynn also told them how difficult it was to get an account with my bank due to how strictly we vetted people. He also did not initially recommend my bank but only did so after they asked if he had any banks in Puerto Rico.
- “The Perth Mint was also probed by the ATO in January, sources with knowledge of the raids say. The company refused to comment on its relationship with Euro Pacific. However, shortly after this masthead asked about its relationship with the Puerto Rican bank, the years-long relationship was severed.”
This is false, as the relationship with me was not severed, as I still worked with the Perth Mint through Euro Pacific Capital, and still do so today. It’s also implied that the relationship was severed due to problems with EPB. It was not. Due to its own problems, the Perth Mint stopped offering omnibus accounts. It was willing to keep working with us as an approved dealer for individual accounts, but that did not work for the bank. So, we had to move the metal to Silver Bullion in Singapore.
- “Westpac terminated its relationship with Euro Pacific in 2018 but won’t say why or provide any details on how much money it helped the bank move.”
It’s true they terminated the relationship with EPB, but it had nothing to do with anything the bank did. Following its $2 billion fine, Westpac exited the line of business that included my bank, even though nothing my bank did was part of the conduct that was the basis for the $2 billion fine.
- “Schiff agreed to an interview last month. It took place via Zoom from his upmarket home outside of New York. His guard was down.”
This was a malicious statement, as the only reason my guard may have been down is that The Age intentionally lowered it by lying to me about the purpose of the interview and topics to be discusses.
31. “In the nine months since the J5’s raids, Euro Pacific’s name had not leaked.”
We know this is a lie, as Euro Pacific’s name had been leaked to McKenzie and Grieve months before the article was written. Their emails confirmed that they knew the name Euro Pacific from the beginning of their “investigation” and that no effort was made by anyone to deduce the name of the target. So the only way they could have known the name is through a leak, and they knew that as they received the leaked information directly from the source.
- “Schiff started talking about topics he’s comfortable with – tax, the economy, the wrongs of government spending.”
I didn’t start talking about those topics; they started the interview by asking me questions about those topics. They got me to agree to do the interview by telling me those were the only topics to be discussed.
- “But the moment he was asked about his Puerto Rican bank, he stiffened and distanced himself from its operations.”
This is a lie. The moment McKenzie asked me about the bank, I was happy to answer his questions and did so calmly for 19 minutes before he first started accusing me of using the bank for money laundering and tax evasion. Also, they were told by multiple former bank employees that I had nothing to do with the running of the bank.
34. “‘I’m just going to get out of this chair if you’re going to keep asking me these kinds of questions,’ he said.”
While I did say this, it was only after I had already repeatedly answered those kinds of questions and had asked McKenzie to stop, as they were beyond the scope of what The Age had asked to interview me about. The quote was used to imply that I refused to answer his questions.
- “Schiff threatened to sue this publication, ripped off his microphone, and stormed out of his own living room.”
I didn’t storm out; I calmly walked out. It was the foyer, not the living room. But this statement and the imagery of me walking out were meant to convey the false impression that I refused to answer questions, had something to hide, and was guilty. But if you watch the entire 50-minute interview, it makes sense that I walked out. Most people would have walked out much sooner.
- “The nation’s peak criminal intelligence agency, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, has listed Euro Pacific as an Australian Priority Organisation Target. This designates it as one of the most serious criminal threats to the nation’s security.”
There was no evidence in discovery that this was true.
- “And before storming away, Schiff made it clear Euro Pacific is going nowhere.”
Again, look at the interview. I never “stormed” anywhere.
- “”Now eventually, I’m hoping that the bank will be profitable,’ he said.”
If it does, it will buck the Greek myth after which Will Day’s and the J5’s operation is named. The ancient story of Atlantis ends with the island sinking forever into the ocean.
This last statement is true, but it implies the bank will never be profitable as it will be shut down. Ironically, it was shut down, but not because the investigation found that it did anything wrong, but because The Age not only exposed the confidential target of the investigation, but prematurely declared the bank guilty. The official reason given by OCIF for closing the bank was low capital, that was the direct result of the losses suffered as a result of the Age and N.Y. Times articles and 60 Minutes broadcast.