Michael Pascoe writes:

There’s a particularly interesting sentence
in today’s ripping Smage yarn about
Paul Hogan and John Cornell’s tax minimisation activities.

The story by Kate McClymont and John
Garnaut links Hogan and Cornell in multi-million dollar schemes with master tax
dodger Philip Egglishaw – the principal of the Swiss firm that’s at the heart
of the Federal Government’s Project Wickenby with its alleged $300 million
worth of tax evasion.

The Smage says Hoges and Strop became
involved by funnelling millions of dollars of royalties from their Crocodile
Dundee films into tax havens. “A portion of Hogan and Cornell’s film royalties is thought to have
initially been sent to Chile and the Netherlands Antilles, in the Caribbean.”

However, the sentence with possibly wider
implications is: “Twentieth
Century Fox, which licensed rights to the Dundee films outside the US, and which is owned by News Corp, is
thought to have facilitated similar arrangements with a number of its Hollywood stars.”

The US Internal Revenue
Service tends to take a rather dim view of tax evasion – it can make our little
ATO look very soft indeed. No doubt Murdoch’s lawyers have carefully checked
the legality of whatever 20th Century Fox “facilitates” for its
stars, but one suspects the IRS might be very interested anyway.

You’ve just gotta
love a great American patriot who facilitates tax avoidance – or perhaps even evasion.