Australia’s electricity grid, hospitals, nursing homes. All off to Caribbean tax havens. What the blazes are we doing allowing a bunch of tax cheats to gut our essential services? What’s the scam?
The scam is that if you are a financial engineering tax grifter from overseas and don’t pay corporate income tax in Australia, you have a 30% advantage over local companies when it comes to winning takeover bids. And these guys from Brookfield are pinning their ears back. Origin Energy is their latest target.
And why not? They must be quietly thinking Australia’s politicians and policy-makers are a bunch of supreme numpties.
A couple of years ago, Brookfield bought 41 private hospitals via the Healthscope takeover. These essential services are now controlled in the Cayman Islands. Then it bought a slather of aged care assets when it bought Aveo. Took that to Bermuda. Then it won AusGrid in an $18bn takeover bid early this year.
They had a crack at AGL too, but failed. Now, they have launched a knock-out bid for Origin Energy along with another mob of faceless private equity dudes from America called EIG. All this has been met with the usual encomiums from a financial press obsessed with deal porn and pathologically incapable of reporting in the public interest.
Who is funding it? We are; because the buyers don’t pay tax and the assets deliver a reliable income stream as government regulated businesses.
What’s next? Any essential service? Any reliable regulated asset which the public funds? Why is nobody watching?
Michael West established Michael West Media in 2016 to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. West was formerly a journalist and editor with Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and even, once, a stockbroker.