Australian nursing homes off to Bermuda as Brookfield swallows Aveo

by Michael West | Sep 4, 2019 | Finance & Tax

Control of Australia’s largest aged care and retirement village company (pure-play) is poised to fall to the tax haven of Bermuda – to be owned by the same group of financial engineers who recently took the country’s largest private hospital business to the Cayman Islands.

Adding insult to taxpayer injury, thousands of Australia retirement village assets and nursing home beds will now be controlled from the same address in Bermuda as notorious law firm, Appleby, of Paradise Papers fame.

Aveo’s nursing home empire is subsidised by taxpayers. Now, having been subsidised by taxpayers, it is off to a tax haven. Effectively, the Government is helping a bunch of foreign financiers to profit from assets which Australian taxpayers are financing.

This website investigated Aveo last year, an undertaking which resulted in two legal threats, one from Herbert Smith Freehills and another from Addison Lawyers, for the same story.

Aveo’s billions: behind the impenetrable aged-care empire

There are 96 communities with approximately 10,000 homes and 200 aged care beds in the Aveo empire – and a pipeline of 5,000 village homesites and 670 aged care beds. Aveo is subject to a $1.2 billion takeover by Brookfield, a global property and finance empire known for its aggressive tax avoidance.

The Implementation Deed for Brookfield’s takeover of Aveo, filed with the ASX, shows the top company in Brookfield’s takeover deal as AOG L.P., “a Bermudan Limited Partnership which will hold Class B securities in an Australian holding company (TopCo, the holding company of BidCo)”.

The structure looks like this: Hydra RL BidCo (which is making the Aveo takeover bid) is owned by Hydra RL TopCo which is owned by AOG, whose address is Canon’s Court, 22 Victoria Street Hamilton, Bermuda; same address as Appleby law firm.

Burnside to Frydenberg: don’t sell hospitals to tax havens

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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.

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