An accountant who was educated at Tongala State School and Echuca High School is at the centre of an international investigation into some of the world’s biggest political identities.
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An ABC investigation by the Four Corners program on Monday evening named Graeme Briggs as the accountant used by these rich and famous clients to form companies and broker real estate deals.
The Pandora Papers are at the centre of the scrutiny, some 11 million documents allegedly leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists by an insider from Mr Briggs’ company.
His company, Asiaciti Trust, has offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, the Cook Islands, Dubai, Nevis, New Zealand, Panama and Samoa.
Asiaciti Trust is one of 14 companies currently being investigated by a group of 600 international journalists who have been handed the leaked documents.
Mr Briggs, 75, still has close friends in the Campaspe region and lives on his vineyard in the elite Mornington Peninsula community of Red Hill.
It was reported that he owns $10 million in real estate, has a rare Japanese pen collection worth $4 million and has a $4 million rare wine collection
He was at school in Tongala in the early 1950s, and then graduated from Echuca High School in 1963.
Mr Briggs begin his accounting firm in Sydney and in the past 40 years has accumulated clients such as the King of Jordan, the former leaders of Nigeria and Czechoslovakia, along with Russia’s biggest banking name, Herman Gef.
Gef is one of the close confidantes of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Mr Briggs can also lay claim to having China’s second richest man, Du Shuanghua, on his list of clients. He reportedly has a $7.4 billion fortune to his name.
The Four Corners program alleged Mr Briggs had set up trusts and shell companies for his wealthy clients and had also assisted them to buy billions of dollars worth of real estate in Australia.
According to the Four Corners program Mr Briggs has been at the centre of significant farming land purchases in north-western Tasmania and in the development of high rise buildings in Sydney – on behalf of his clients.
Mr Briggs was described by the ABC as one of the first accountants to use small countries, such as Samoa, as tax havens through offshore accounts for his clients.
It alleges Mr Briggs had “turned a blind eye” to who he was dealing with and as a result had become a wealthy man, accumulating a fortune estimated at $AUD62 million.
The Pandora Papers have caused a political storm around the world as the papers name some of the world's best-known, and most controversial, political figures.
A senior Australian Taxation Office investigator described the alleged accounting fraud as a “Russian doll sort of arrangement”, which made it almost impossible to trace until the papers were released for authorities to unwind the ownership structure.
The report described the world that Mr Briggs had allegedly created for his clients as a "parallel universe", a world in which he could provide them with a conduit to develop further wealth through international property and company purchases.
Singapore provided the initial launching pad for Mr Briggs’ company, the 17 per cent corporate tax rate making it the ideal location from which to conduct his international dealings.
He was once fined in excess of $1 million by the Singapore government for being delinquent in his diligence of fighting money laundering.
But it did not put him out of business, in fact, according to the Four Corners report it was nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
Lindsay Makin, who went to Tongala and Echuca schools with Mr Briggs, described him as “a good friend”.
“We used to travel together on the train to Echuca, from Tongala, and if I remember right he was a prefect on the train,” Mr Makin said.
Mr Makin now lives in the southern suburbs of Sydney and watched the Four Corners program with interest on Monday evening.
“I knew what he did, working in international taxation, but I didn’t realise who he worked with,” Mr Makin said.
Mr Makin worked as a food technologist for 30 years with the Nestle company, which recently closed at Tongala, finishing in the role as general manager of export.
“We had a school reunion a few years ago and Graeme wasn’t well, so he couldn’t go,” he said.
“The last time I saw him was at his father’s funeral.”
Mr Makin has lived in Sydney for the past 50 years.
He said he was aware Mr Briggs was a good player with Tongala’s Under-17 team.
He said he would not have considered his classmate to be any sort of mathematical genius, in fact, there were several students with better grades.
“Graeme was just a regular guy. He was a pretty good footballer and an okay student, without being brilliant,” he said.
“We had a guy in our form, Neil North I think his name was. He was a genius,” Mr Makin said.
Mr Makin said he had planned to visit Mr Briggs at his vineyard at some time in the future, but had just never got around to it.
He said while he was aware of his connections to the world of international tax, Monday evening’s revelations were “quite surprising”.
“We were in the scouts together at Tongala and our fathers knew each other pretty well.
“I lost touch with him when he went to university,” Mr Makin said.
As for the revelation that Mr Briggs had spruiked as a teenager that he was going to be a millionaire before he was 30-years-old?
“We probably all said that we wanted to be millionaires back then,” Mr Makin said.
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