High-profile tax adviser and former Inland Revenue Department official Brent Gilchrist has been found guilty of six charges of helping orchestrate a fictitious invoice writing scheme as part of a tax avoidance scheme.
In two judgments relating to different tax avoidance schemes, delivered by Justice Simon France in Wellington High Court, Gilchrist is characterised as an adviser with "a propensity to destroy records" and "someone always conscious of covering their tracks".
"Particularly when Mr Gilchrist is involved, the evidence is replete with examples of documents being created solely for the purpose of creating a false paper trail," Justice France says.
However, Gilchrist was found not guilty on six other charges relating to tax evasion of around $NZ1.5 million by Paul O'Connor, the one-time owner of media clipping services firm Media Search, because Justice France considered Gilchrist's involvement from 2004 onwards was late in the piece.
O'Connor was found guilty on 14 charges relating to the way he managed the affairs of various Media Search-related entities to evade tax throughout an extended period in the 1990s and 2000s.
Name suppression on O'Connor was lifted on Friday morning.
A third man charged in both cases, Scott Anderson, was found guilty on two charges in the O'Connor case and guilty of the same six charges as Gilchrist in the fictitious invoicing case, in which Justice France found that Anderson and Gilchrist had been involved in creating and amending documents to try to obscure a relevant chain of events in 2005 and 2006.
The judgment rejected Gilchrist's defence in the fictitious invoicing scheme of "peripheral innocent involvement", although the judge admitted surprise Gilchrist had participated in what Gilchrist himself had described to the court as "a naked fraud with no tax credibility of sophistication".
"Mr Gilchrist is plainly an aggressive tax adviser willing, the evidence irrefutably establishes, to create false paper trails to mislead IRD and willing to create false invoices to mislead a bank.
"None of this reflects well on him at all," the judge said of the former newspaper columnist on tax matters.
The scheme involved some $137,812.50 of invoices issued between March and July 2006 which an accountant, known only as AB, believed was allowing him to buy tax losses which would be routed through bank accounts in Vanuatu and the funds repatriated in New Zealand.
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