Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to take note of two articles that have been published just in recent hours: one by David Ross from the Australian Business Review, entitled 'Former PwC partner Paul McNab points the finger at international links to tax scandal', and another by Tom Ravlic published in the Mandarin, entitled 'PwC Australia provides perfect example of how not to respond to an inquiry, says senator'. The senator to whom Mr Ravlic is referring there is Senator Paul Scarr, who I was very proud to work alongside in the inquiry into what PwC have been up to. One of the things they failed to do was to provide a report we have been talking about called the Linklaters report, which is a report that they commissioned and paid for themselves. We haven't seen the terms of reference for that. We don't know what is actually in there. But we do suspect, based on a five-line press release—that's the sum total of information we have in the public space—that six people have been sanctioned for their engagement. Today, courtesy of Mr David Ross, we find:

… Paul McNab—

one of the people named by PwC as a baddie in the tax evasion scandal—

alleges PwC International Washington National Tax Services partner Matthew Chen received allegedly confidential Australian government tax information in 2014 in part of a suite of emails detailing reform plans.

We know this because it's gone to court. It wasn't revealed to the Senate by the PwC entity in any way, shape or form, nor was it provided to us by direction of the master of all of this, the global general counsel, Diana Weiss. (Time expired)