What happened Friday 9 February, 2024
With that, we’ll wrap up our live coverage of the day’s news.
Here’s a summary of the key developments:
Investigators are probing how firefighters came to douse parts of a West Australian town in sewage wastewater while battling a bushfire.
The publishing of a Jewish creatives WhatsApp group chat and the contact details of alleged participants has led to death threats and forced one family into hiding, Labor MP Josh Burns has said.
The Reserve Bank governor, Michele Bullock, has said that Labor’s redesigned stage-three tax cuts will not have a material impact on inflation.
The Coalition will move to force the government to bring in an airline passenger compensation scheme that would make carriers pay cash to delayed customers, in a bill dubbed “pay on delay”.
Regional councils in Australia have reported seeing people sleeping rough “for the first time in living memory” on the back of a significant increase in home values since the start of the pandemic, a national housing summit has heard.
A mother has sobbed and a father has hugged a prosecutor outside court as four boys were found guilty of murdering their 16-year-old son in a Melbourne street attack.
Thanks for reading. Have a pleasant evening.
EY apologises after former employee fired for allegedly promoting tax minimisation scheme
There’s been another apology from consultants in the Senate.
This time, it’s EY Oceania, which has apologised to clients who have been implicated in the civil prosecution of a former employee, who is accused of promoting a tax minimisation scheme and receiving more than $700,000 in unauthorised payments.
The former employee, whose name cannot be revealed due to a suppression order, is being sued by the commissioner of taxation in the federal court.
The firm’s tax and law leader, Scott Grimley, said the firm took action against the former employee before the ATO did. He said three clients have been drawn into the ongoing court case.
We have taken action against the former [employee] and that was taken as soon as we were able to establish the facts and establish a course of action, and obviously following due process, that former partner was terminated.
We are very sorry for those clients and that they’ve had to similarly have to deal with this matter.
EY Oceania’s chief executive, David Larocca, said the firm had wanted to speak about the issue publicly for many months but was restrained from doing so by a suppression order that was eventually revised:
We have absolutely missed this. We missed that this has happened.
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