Tax Office Hopes For $6m Of Rivkin Estate
The Age
Saturday July 7, 2007
THE Australian Taxation Office stands to recover more than $6 million from Rene Rivkin's deceased estate.
The late stockbroker's family has agreed to hand over more than $3 million this week, and the estate's lawyer has said he sees "a reasonable prospect" of retrieving as much again from overseas. Late on Thursday the Rivkin family agreed to contribute more than $3 million cash to the bankrupt estate and to forgo their own claims to recover about $5 million from it. Peter Harkin, a partner of the law firm Colin Biggers & Paisley, said yesterday: "I think there's more than a reasonable prospect that creditors will see a significant amount of money coming in from overseas, possibly of the level we are talking about under this week's agreement." Mr Harkin is legal adviser to the bankruptcy trustee, Anthony Warner, of the accounting firm CRS Warner Sanderson. As part of the settlement Mr Warner abandoned court orders he had obtained for six family members to give evidence at public examinations about Mr Rivkin's assets. The Federal Magistrates Court had issued summonses to his former wife, Gayle, his mother, Rachel, and four of his five children, Damien, Jordan, Shannon and Dion. Mr Harkin said the family members had demonstrated "a preparedness to co-operate, both in terms of the recovery of the assets and in terms of the contribution to Rene's bankrupt estate". The biggest beneficiary will be the Tax Office, which issued an assessment for $29 million in back tax last year. It recently revised the bill, thought to relate to Mr Rivkin's controversial share trading through Swiss bank accounts, to $21 million. Mr Warner is still planning to call Mr Rivkin's tax lawyer, Richard Gelski, a partner of the law firm Johnson Winter & Slattery, to give evidence in court. He has also reserved the option of recalling George Freris, Mr Rivkin's helicopter pilot, who appeared in court on Thursday. Mr Freris said he went to Switzerland with his boss "many times", and had been out to dinner there with Ernst Imfeld, Mr Rivkin's manager at the Bank Leumi in Zurich. This week's settlement effectively overturned a formal asset-splitting agreement signed by Rene and Gayle Rivkin in February 2004 under the Family Law Act. It is believed that in addition to returning cash to the estate, Mrs Rivkin has dropped all her existing claims on the estate and waived her Family Law rights to claim a share in any assets recovered in future in Australia or overseas.
© 2007 The Age