AA News
New Delhi
Disclaimer: This article is an unedited, unmodified extract from The Sydney
Morning Herald article by award winning Australian journalist Nick McKenzie
(who was won the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year twice and
Kennedy Award for journalist of the year), released on March 9, 2024
In the early hours of June 19, 2013, a panic-wracked Australian businessman
boarded an international flight and held his breath. Hours earlier, Amit Gupta’s
Gold Coast home had been raided by the federal police.
Investigators had spent weeks tapping Gupta’s phone, probing sensational
allegations he had backed a political coup on the small Pacific Island of Nauru
by bribing multiple politicians who had plotted to topple the government. The
new government, Gupta hoped, would give him complete control over the
island nation’s lucrative mining rights, but an arrest now could mean years in
jail.
Tycoon Who Outsmarted the Law
If these moments of apprehension, with the Australian police snapping at his
heels, were Gupta’s low point, they were fleeting. As his plane soared into the
morning sky, his future stretched out brightly ahead.
In the decade since, this alleged corporate crime kingpin and fugitive from
justice has built a global business worth an estimated $800 million. This
masthead has tracked Gupta to Dubai where, late last year, he got more
good news: Australian efforts to extradite him had collapsed, rebuffed by the
Dubai authorities over a legal technicality.
Gupta had defeated the AFP’s extradition attempt using a legal technicality.
Australian police alleged he had engaged in a conspiracy to bribe Nauruan
politicians over a decade earlier, but Gupta argued that given no such crime
existed in the United Arab Emirates at the time of his alleged offending, he
could not be extradited. The UAE authorities agreed and threw out the
extradition request. That was in February 2023, but the development has not
been reported until now.
The Nauru bribery scandal first erupted in 2010, when a report in The
Australian alleged Australian police and intelligence agencies were scrutinising
a plot by the then Gold Coast-based Gupta and his relatives to use bribery to
effectively transform Nauru into a puppet state, with its only industry –
phosphate mining – entirely controlled by Gupta’s business interests.
It took the AFP two years, in October 2012, to tap Gupta’s phone. Eight months
later, they raided his Gold Coast home. In 2015, this masthead and the ABC
reported on allegations that charges might be imminent. By then Gupta was two
years on the lam.
Gupta’s emails expose a systemic alleged bribery operation targeting Nauru’s
most powerful politicians with the aim of winning preference for his and his
family’s business, and particularly exclusive rights to phosphate and long,
ongoing contracts. In doing so, his dealings threatened the political stability of
the island nation of 13,000 people and stood to poison its democracy. Records
of Gupta company transactions obtained by this masthead suggest Gupta’s
questionable corporate behaviour from his Gold Coast base extended well
beyond Nauru and the phosphate industry. Banking records suggest Gupta’s
companies also paid suspected bribes to senior Algerian officials for mining
concessions in Africa, used a poverty-stricken Indian man as a “straw man”
director of one his companies, and issued fake invoices for phosphate bought
from countries such as Togo.
Leaked corporate and banking documents reveal how Gupta’s companies
generated a system of fictitious invoices and expenses to move money out of
Australia, and how he avoided millions in Australian taxes.
Documents show the federal police’s Getax investigation spent years tracking
this global movement of funds. In 2020, the AFP moved to seize multiple
properties and bank accounts connected to Gupta in Australia, Singapore and
New York worth an estimated $200 million.
Agrifields DMCC. It is the name of the global fertiliser firm Gupta launched
after fleeing Australia.
