Australian Turf Club partners with Hong Kong Jockey Club in landmark deal for their slot in The Everest
The deal ensures that barring injury or some unforeseen circumstance, the world's number one-ranked racehorse, Hong Kong's superstar sprinter Ka Ying Rising, will contest the Group 1 $20 million The TAB Everest at Royal Randwick on October 18.
Hall of Fame trainer David Hayes has also indicated Ka Ying Rising will stay in Sydney for the $3 million Russell Balding Stakes (1300m) at Rosehill Gardens two weeks later.
ATC will benefit financially from the World Pool, the international commingling parimutuel betting operation which is managed by HKJC and will be available to punters on Everest Day.
There is also speculation the World Pool will be added to more Sydney race meetings next season, most notably Golden Slipper Day which boasts five Group 1 races.
HKJC executive director of racing, Andrew Harding, told Hong Kong media the club has secured the ATC's Everest slot for two years with an option to extend.
'For this year, the club will use the slot to enable Ka Ying Rising to take part in The Everest,'' Harding told South China Morning Post.
'In future years, we will use the slot to either facilitate a Hong Kong horse running or to target Australian or New Zealand sprinters to come onto the Hong Kong International races after The Everest.''
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Ka Ying Rising joins Briasa (slot holders Max Whitby, Neil Werrett and Col Madden) and Private Harry (Yulong) as confirmed Everest starters.
Sunshine In Paris, owned by Everest slot-holder John Camilleri of Fairway Thoroughbreds, is also being set for the big race.
The world’s best sprinter is coming to Australia! Ka Ying Rising will race for new slot-holder the Hong Kong Jockey Club �
Here he is making it 12-straight wins, dominating the Chairman’s Sprint ðŸ'¥ pic.twitter.com/CH8YZSsVp4
â€' SKY Racing (@SkyRacingAU) June 4, 2025
This leaves eight slots remaining and competition for an Everest start will be fierce – but not everyone is happy.
A leading Sydney trainer contacted At The Track incensed that ATC had not used their slot for an 'ATC trained horse'.
'Surely that's the idea of a slot,'' the trainer said. 'That's like Wayne Bennett picking a player from another club for the grand final. What a disgrace.''
The trainer's disappointment is understandable but the financial benefits to ATC for leasing their slot HKJC and having the World Pool alignment on Everest Day is considerable, and the club wants the best possible field for the world's richest turf race so securing Ka Ying Rising was the number one priority.
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Is Coolmore's three-year-old filly Minnie Hauk, winner of the English Oaks yesterday, the most valuable potential broodmare still racing?
Minnie Hauk, a daughter of English superhorse Franke l and closely related on her dam's side to another champion, Kingman, was purchased for about $A4 million as a yearling at the Goffs Orby Sale and her Oaks win means she is now a priceless broodmare once her racing days are over.
Minnie Hauk takes the Oaks (G1)!
pic.twitter.com/uIFsnXhLLZ
â€' IFHA's Longines World's Best Racehorse Rankings (@worldsbesthorse) June 6, 2025
The regally-bred Minnie Hauk gave Irish training genius Aidan O'Brien his 11th Oaks win when she defeated her stablemate Whirl.
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The US triple crown isn't on the line but the final leg of the famous series, the Belmont Stakes, takes on special significance with the return clash of Godolphin's Sovereignty and Coolmore's Journalism in New York on Sunday morning.
Sovereignty won an epic Kentucky Derby from Journalism last month but missed the second leg, the Preakness Stakes.
In his absence, Journalism scored an incredible Preakness win and is early favourite with TAB Fixed Odds for the Belmont at $2.60 with Sovereignty pressing at $2.80.
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ABC News
2 hours ago
- ABC News
How easy is it to trick the Australian Taxation Office?
Sam Hawley: How easy is it to trick the Australian Tax Office? Well, for fraudsters it's not hard at all and plenty have done it costing taxpayers billions of dollars that have never been recovered. Today, Angus Grigg on his Four Corners investigation into the biggest GST scam in history and how the ATO dropped the ball. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily. Sam Hawley: Angus, you've been hard at work looking into what's going on at the Australian Tax Office. And you've really been having a deep look into this huge GST scam. Now, this unfolded in no other than Mildura in north-west Victoria. So, take me there and tell me about local resident Sarah. Angus Grigg: Yeah. Mildura is a really beautiful town, an irrigation town on the Murray in North West Victoria. And this GST scam really took off in Mildura. And it really was circulating within a sort of population that you might say is low socioeconomic groups, people on welfare, people with addiction issues. And we went to interview one person called Sarah. She was going through quite a bit of financial hardship at the time. I think she'd separated from her partner who was facing pretty serious charges at the time as well. And she was short of money because she needed to have some dental work done. So one of her friends showed her how to use a business that had been registered and an ABN linked to GST to claim GST refunds fraudulently. 'Sarah': The people that I was associating with at that time, they had done it and told me how easy it was to get a large amount of money quickly. And I just thought at the time it was a good idea because I was in a bit of financial trouble. Angus Grigg: She pretended, if you like, to be a hairdresser, despite the fact that she had no hairdressing qualifications. She'd never worked in a hairdresser, hadn't hired premises, had no equipment. And so she logged into her myGov account and first of all, claimed $15,000 and then did it a second time and got another $15,000. 'Sarah': I don't even really still understand how it went through. I was a single parent and then all of a sudden I'm a hairdresser that's getting this return put into my account with no other payments from clients or anything like that to balance it was needed. Like no proof. Angus Grigg: Now, bear in mind, the money went into the same account as her welfare payments and the money went within about 10 days without any verification, without any checks, without anyone from the tax office ringing and saying, what did you spend this money on? Do you have hairdressing qualifications? Have you hired premises? You know, she just absolutely couldn't believe how easy it was. 'Sarah': Yeah, I just couldn't believe it that it was just sitting there on my everyday access debit bank card. Angus Grigg: Now, the other thing to bear in mind, to receive a GST refund of $30,000, she would have needed to have capital expenditure or bought stock and other items for her hairdressing business of about $300,000. Now, surely a single mother living on welfare, getting family tax benefits, that should have been a red flag for the tax office. Sam Hawley: Wow. Okay. So Sarah, which is not her real name, just by the way, you've changed that for this story to keep her anonymous. She just tells the ATO she's a hairdresser and then the tax office falls for it. That's extraordinary. Angus Grigg: It is. And the fact that you don't need a receipt, you don't need any proof of the line of work you're in is extraordinary. And that's because the tax office basically fired most of the humans in the loop and started relying on algorithms or computers, if you like, to make these payments. They wanted to ensure the timely payment of GST refunds to businesses. But in doing that, they really opened the door up to fraud. Sam Hawley: Right. Sure. So the tax office wants to streamline things. But in the meantime, people like Sarah are all of a sudden dabbling in fraud. And as we've mentioned, she's not the only one. There's a lot of other people doing a very similar thing. Tell me about Linden Phillips. What was he up to? Angus Grigg: Linden Phillips, once again from Mildura, for us, he was like patient zero. It looks like he was the really one of the very, very early people in this scam. So what happens is that Linden Phillips gets out of jail in August 2021. And he already has a company registered. And so he reactivates his GST registration through his ABN and his MyGov account. And then within a couple of weeks of getting out of jail, he does what I'd sort of call a test run. And he claims $13,000 in GST refunds from the tax office. Once again, no documents, no receipts, no verification required. He gets that money within a couple of weeks and clearly then thinks, OK, I'm going to go for the big one. And so what he does is he lodges 46 backdated GST claims for an amount of $821,000 in GST. And the real kicker here is that for most of the period those GST claims are lodged, he's actually in jail. Sam Hawley: Oh my gosh. Angus Grigg: I know. He just couldn't make it up. Sam Hawley: What does he do with all that money? Angus Grigg: Well, of course, he spends it, right? Within a couple of weeks, the money's completely gone. He buys himself a second-hand Porsche. Somewhat endearingly, he buys his mother a house. But the really damning thing here is that the tax office notice it. Finally, someone, there's a human in the loop and they pick up the fact that, hey, maybe something's a bit wrong here. And so they ring him up and he says, oh yeah, no, it's all legitimate. I'll get my accountant to call you. The accountant never calls. They send him some emails. They write him some letters. He ignores them all. And the really damning thing here is the tax office does nothing for four months. And in that four month period, this scam absolutely explodes. So what we did is we went back and we deconstructed, if you like, the tax office's narrative. And the narrative was that this fraud took off on social media. The tax office noticed it. They cracked down really hard, really quickly, and they brought it under control. Now we sort about testing that idea. Sam Hawley: So the ATO says it did this great job. It cracked down on this fraud. But what actually happened? Because you actually had a look at that and discovered, in fact, the ATO didn't do much at all. Angus Grigg: No, exactly. So Linden Phillips does finally get caught, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the ATO. It all comes down to the smarts of a local detective in Mildura named Vanessa Power. Now, she is attending Phillips's house on a drugs and gun charge, and she searches his premises, his house, and she confiscates a phone. And using the sort of smarts that the ATO should be employing, she sees that on his phone there appears to be a pretty elaborate GST scam. And in fact, it looks as though that Linden Phillips had helped 60 other people perpetrate this scam. Linden Phillips is arrested. And then a few weeks later, the ATO finally launch what they call Operation Protego, which is to crack down on this GST scam. Sam Hawley: Wow. Okay. And at that point, of course, Sarah, who we spoke about earlier, she was also arrested back in December 2022. But the thing is, the money, it's sort of gone, right? 'Sarah': I can't pay it back. It's not even an option at the moment. Or it probably never will be. Sam Hawley: Is there any way the tax office can actually get these funds back? Angus Grigg: Well, this is the point, right? In the end, $2 billion was stolen from the tax system by 56,000 people. Now, the ATO tell us that of those 56,000 people who perpetrated this scam, just 120, I think it might be 122 now, have been convicted. Secondly, of the $2 billion stolen, the ATO tells us that only 160 million, or around 8% of that, has been recovered. Sam Hawley: And, Angus, that money, it really is just a drop in the ocean, right? Because you've also looked at all the other funds that the ATO hasn't managed to collect, and you've spoken to Karen Payne. Now, she's a former Inspector General of Taxation. She basically says if the ATO had collected what it was owed, then we would all be paying less tax. Angus Grigg: Yeah. Karen Payne, she really focused on what's called collectible debt. And that is this sort of giant number that the ATO doesn't like to talk about. And when she started looking at it, it was about $30 billion. Then it rose to about $50 billion. The figure is now $53 billion. And that is the amount of money or taxes that the ATO has levied, if you like, but not collected. Karen Payne, Inspector General of Taxation, 2019-24: The large percentage of the debts that were due were in fact owned by a very small number of taxpayers or they're related to a small number of taxpayer accounts. So you'd kind of think it's a small number of people you need to be chasing. Angus Grigg: And the point that Karen Payne was making is that if we collected all that tax, perhaps we would not have to pay as much tax, all of us, but also we'd have more money to spend on really basic things like schools, roads and hospitals. Karen Payne, Inspector General of Taxation, 2019-24: The fact that it keeps rising is troubling. So it's fundamental, I think, that we've got good administration of the tax system because the integrity of the tax system is fundamentally important to all of us. It pays for all of the services that we benefit from. Sam Hawley: Angus, despite everything that you have said, which is frankly really concerning, the ATO itself thinks it's doing a pretty good job, right? Because Chris Jordan, who was the tax commissioner up until 2024, he's been putting a rather positive spin on the ATO's work. Angus Grigg: Yeah. This is the really extraordinary thing. Despite all these scandals, the ATO tells us they are doing a great job. Just before Chris Jordan stepped down as tax commissioner, he did a victory lap, if you like, at the National Press Club, and he pointed out all the great, terrific things that the ATO has done. Chris Jordan, Tax Commissioner, 2013-24: We've successfully charted a massive program of transformation. We've cut red tape and we've modernised our administration of the tax system as part of the digital revolution to make tax just happen.
Daily Telegraph
4 hours ago
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Melbourne Vixens stun NSW Swifts in preliminary final comeback, grand final vs West Coast Fever
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News.com.au
5 hours ago
- News.com.au
Australia claim 4x100m relay double at World Swimming Championships
Cop that America, Australia have claimed the 4x100m relay double at the Singapore World Swimming Championships on Sunday. First up it was the women who locked horns with the Aussie quartet of Mollie O'Callaghan, Meg Harris, Milla Jansen and Olivia Wunsch taking to the pool. With two teenagers in Jansen and Wunsch in the team, America went into the final as the favourites but the stage didn't overawe the youngsters. After O'Callaghan and Harris got the Aussies off and running, it was the two youngsters who brought it home. In what was a neck and neck battle, it was Wunsch who produced the swim of her life to hunt down American Tori Huske and touch the wall first by only 0.44 seconds. Then it was over to the men who entered the final as heavy underdogs against the strength of the Italian and American squads. Flynn Southam, Kai James Taylor and Maximillian Giuliani gave it their all through the first three legs, but the Aussies were still stranded behind the Americans. Enter Kyle Chalmers. The sprint king produced a final leg for the ages as he hunted down his Italian and American rivals to touch the wall and hand Australia a commonwealth record and the gold medal. Earlier, Germany's Olympic champion Lukas Maertens won a thrilling 400m freestyle gold pipping Australia's Sam Short by 0.02sec. in a nailbiting finish. Maertens, who broke the world record earlier this year, came home in 3min 42.35sec after a fierce battle with Short, the 2023 world champion. South Korea's Kim Woo-min, the reigning world champion, was third in 3:42.60. Maertens was the favourite for the title after breaking the world record in Stockholm in April, a mark that had stood since 2009. But Short fought him every stroke of the way, losing out after an incredible tussle to the finish. 'I thought we were going a bit faster, to be honest,' Short told Channel 9 after the race. 'It's a high-pressure event. Two fast 400s in a day, really hard. I won two years ago by 0.02, and I just lost by 0.02. I'm happy to be back on the podium after a hard last year, so I can't complain. 'I didn't even know how I was going to go. All staging camp, or at least 75 per cent of it, I was in quarantine, I had Covid. A lot of mental strength that I've learned this year, I'm just stoked.' Short later went on to reveal that his aunty had recently passed away, dedicating his performance to her. 'This year has been really hard,' he said. 'No one really knows everything. I want to dedicate that performance to my aunty who just passed away a couple of weeks ago... it's been quite hard for my family recently... however bad I was hurting there, nowhere near as bad as her battling cancer the last 10 years.' The result gave Maertens his first world title after claiming Olympic gold in Paris last year. He followed that up by setting a new world record of 3:39.96, shaving 0.11sec off the mark achieved by fellow German Paul Biedermann at the world championships in Rome in July 2009. Biedermann's mark of 3:40.07 was achieved wearing a polyurethane swimsuit that has since been banned in competition. Short missed out on an Olympic medal in the event in Paris, finishing fourth. Australia's Elijah Winnington, the Paris Olympics silver medallist, surprisingly failed to qualify for the final. Short finished fastest in the morning heats ahead of Maertens.
