A former New York property developer has been sentenced on 41 charges relating to tax fraud totalling more than $1.5m.<\/p>\n
Colin David Rath came to New Zealand on an entrepreneur residency visa in 2016, and bought a 28-hectare North Canterbury vineyard, Fiddler’s Green, two years later.<\/p>\n
Over a four-year period from 2017 to 2021, Rath filed fraudulent goods and services tax (GST) returns worth $1,506,833.81 for two companies related to the vineyard, Waipara Winds Limited and New York Grape Escape.<\/p>\n
Rath told Inland Revenue in his April 2021 return he spent $1.6m on a spec house, a subdivision and work on a bed and breakfast.<\/p>\n
But when investigators visited the property, they discovered the spec house belonged to someone else.<\/p>\n
The building company named in the contract confirmed it had done work for Rath, but it had not built a spec house for him, nor had it been paid for the work it had done on Rath’s property.<\/p>\n
At Christchurch District Court on Wednesday, he was sentenced to three years and seven months in prison on two representative charges of using forged documents and 39 charges of dishonestly using a document to obtain a pecuniary advantage.<\/p>\n
In a statement, Inland Revenue said it took the integrity of the tax system seriously and would apply all available recovery options where dishonesty has led to serious loss to New Zealanders.<\/p>\n
It confirmed none of the defrauded funds had yet been recovered.<\/p>\n
But a spokesperson said Rath’s vineyard was up for sale and the proceeds would go towards paying it back.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
source rnz<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A former New York property developer has been sentenced on 41 charges relating to tax fraud totalling more than $1.5m. Colin David Rath came to New Zealand on an entrepreneur residency visa in 2016, and bought a 28-hectare North Canterbury vineyard, Fiddler’s Green, two years later. Over a four-year period from 2017 to 2021, Rath […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":3576,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3575"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3577,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3575\/revisions\/3577"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}