Talk:Michael Cranston

Phoenixing
The article mentions "phoenixing", and perhaps what is meant is Phoenix company, but I think in this particular sense, it is Bottom of the harbour tax avoidance? I'm not familiar enough with Australian law to determine if these cases are the same. Can anyone help clean this up? McKay (talk) 15:40, 6 May 2019 (UTC)


 * I am not sure either. Possibly Phoenixing can be thought of as a serial case of bottom of the harbour. For bottom of the harbour it occurs with a single company that disappears never to return. Whereas with Phoenixing it is done repetitively, with a second company following the first, a third company following the second, etc, with new victims in each iteration. It could be appropriate to consider whether Plutus Payroll was a distinct and new scenario using multiple tiers of companies (mass produced multi-level Phoenixing ?), neither purely the original design of Phoenixing nor resembling bottom of the harbour. It also differed from Phoenixing and Bottom of the Harbour in that it worked entirely by intercepting tax remittances and siphoning parts of those remittances off to the perpetrators. There was no quasi-legitimate business model in play. Donald Telfer (talk) 05:42, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

Additional Sources
This article was referenced by "Cool Freaks' Wikipedia Club" on facebook, for having excessive references on one sentence (in [this version https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_Cranston&oldid=885581115]) With implied allegations of WP:COI editing. So I first wikified the page, then I went to work on that sentence. The sentence originally read "There are no allegations that Mr Cranston had prior knowledge of, or culpability in respect of, the alleged illegal activities of one or two of his children.", that sentence seems to be impossible to verify, but perhaps there were statements made to that effect. In the first few articles I found nothing to that effect, so I categorized the statements into three buckets: After having done this for the first 5 articles, I didn't think there was additional value (for me at least, but probably for the wiki) in going through the 42 remaining references, but I created a subpage here in case someone else wants to add them to the article. Talk:Michael Cranston/Additional references McKay (talk) 16:20, 6 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Police didn't believe he was part of the conspiracy
 * Was not part of the fraud
 * Accessed information he shouldn't have


 * I added the multiple references. My intention was to place the additional references at the end of the text section of the article - without meaning that they referred to information in the last sentence of the article. I put them there as a way of pointing interested persons to "Further reading" in various newspapers. Plutus Payroll is a more significant matter than Michael Cranston. Yet there is a Wikipedia article on Michael Cranston but no Wikipedia article on Plutus Payroll.
 * I do not know if there is some mechanism in Wikipedia for adding references at the bottom of the article in the references section without them attracting the numerals.
 * Plutus Payroll ended up being assessed as a $105 million fraud and was a much bigger story than the Wikipedia article on Mr Michael Cranston reflects. The references I added could be useful if someone ever created a Plutus Payroll article. (I do not know how to do this - create an article - I also have only just recently succeeded in adding images as thumbnails to an article titled "Tax File Numbers" - I would like to know how / be able to size and locate images at defined positions in articles.)
 * I have no personal connection with Mr Cranston, although I have a letter from him (but presumably written by an underling) in relation to my taxation affairs. The letter evidently does not mean what it says. In many cases, not meaning what it says is characteristic of many documents emanating from governments as well as news as portrayed by the media. Donald Telfer (talk) 05:23, 9 June 2023 (UTC)