Mr Shi,an accused tax evader,has for two years refused to provide the information to Tax Commissioner Chris Jordan and his investigators. The High Court is now being asked to weigh the right of an individual – Mr Shi –to be protected from self-incrimination against the public good in the recovery of a multimillion-dollar tax debt.
Mr Shi has been of interest to Tax Office investigators since 2014. His wealth is built on his many years of operating 29 companies supplying 1100 Chinese,Taiwanese and other Asian workers a year to the meat industry. His businesses earned revenues of $349 million between 2008 and 2017.
His empire came crashing down in 2018,when the Australian Federal Police executed search warrants on several of his properties. The warrants listed Mr Shi as being suspected of 11 criminal offences,including money laundering,tax fraud,secret commissions and breaches of migration laws. He was ordered by the Federal Court in 2019 to pay $42 million to the Tax Office. This amount remains unpaid.
Loading
Lawyers for the Tax Office argue the case has ramifications for the “effective operation,supervision and enforcement of freezing orders”,and represents the first time the High Court has had to consider the power of lower courts to issue certificates to protect criminal suspects against self-incrimination.
In responding to the court order,Mr Shi provided one document to the Tax Office which said his Australian-based assets were worth just $360,000. He provided a photocopied version of another document in a sealed envelope with details of the enormous sums his companies had transferred from Australia to China over several years.
Mr Shi then initiated legal action to ensure that document was never shown to the Tax Office because he feared it contained information that could be used in a criminal prosecution against him. Mr Shi has still not been charged with any criminal offences.