And Glencore’s instruction for a bank application for its shipping fleet that hid the fact that one of its directors was in prison.

But mostly Glencore was concerned about Operation Everest, the PwC-drafted plan (with PowerPoint) to move $30 billion of resource projects out of the Australian tax net after a $16 billion writedown.

Court sidesteps issue

The ATO took the view that organising currency swaps, writedowns and tax-driven restructures might not always qualify as privileged. On Wednesday the High Court sidestepped that issue but found that once the ATO had the documents it was game over for Glencore’s privilege claim.

Glencore always looked like it was on a hiding to nothing with this case. But the Swiss miner may have had a broader audience in mind.

It's a simplification plan . . . Operation Everest wrote off $16 billion in assets and moved $30 billion of assets out of the Australian tax net.

It followed demands to Glencore from the US Justice Department for documents about its payments to intermediary companies in Venezuela, Nigeria and Congo, in an investigation under the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and money laundering statutes.

Glencore’s launch of the High Court action bolstered its global case that it can’t be held to account for Appleby’s legally privileged documents. It's the vibe.


And indeed there are some jurisdictions that share Glencore’s view about privilege. Like Malta.

In 2016 the Financial Review together with journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia revealed that Malta’s energy minister and the prime minister’s chief of staff had secretly set up Panama companies owned via New Zealand offshore trusts.

After Caruana Galizia was killed in a car bomb in October 2017 a Maltese magistrate found that the Panama Papers documents had been illegally obtained from law firm Mossack Fonseca and so could not be examined.