Australian media company pays Peter Schiff to end defamation case
An Australian media company agreed to pay more than $360,000 to outspoken libertarian economist and money manager Peter Schiff to resolve a defamation lawsuit he filed over a 2020 report about a boutique bank in Puerto Rico that he once owned.
The agreement, reached earlier this month, came more than a year after an Australian judge ruled that a report by the Nine Entertainment television program had defamed Mr. Schiff in its coverage of his institution, Euro Pacific Bank in San Juan.
Mr. Schiff’s lawsuit focused on a television segment broadcast by the Australian version of “60 Minutes.” The segment included a previously unknown investigation by a group of international tax authorities, including the Internal Revenue Service, into Euro Pacific and some of its offshore customers. The investigation examined whether some of the bank’s customers were guilty of tax evasion or money laundering.
The New York Times wrote its own article about the investigation in collaboration with ’60 Minutes’ and the newspaper The Age, also owned by Nine Entertainment. Mr Schiff had also sued the newspaper, but the Australian judge did not find that The Age had defamed Mr Schiff.
The Times was not a party to the lawsuit.
In a statement, Mr. Schiff said he filed the lawsuit because the Nine Media Companies “found me guilty of crimes for which investigators ultimately found no evidence to even charge me.”
The settlement also required Nine to pay legal and court fees to Mr. Schiff and to remove the “60 Minutes” report. News of the deal was first reported by publications in Australia.
In a statement, Nine said it supported its journalists and that “60 Minutes” accepted the judge’s ruling. The articles, which have not been determined to be defamatory, will remain online.
Last year, bank officials in Puerto Rico tried to shut down Euro Pacific, claiming capital levels were inadequate. Mr. Schiff subsequently reached an agreement with bank regulators to liquidate Euro Pacific and agreed to pay $300,000 in fines.
The international tax investigation, led by a group called the J5, did not bring charges against Mr. Schiff or Euro Pacific. But in February, tax officials in Britain said they had arrested two customers of the bank on “suspicion of tax evasion and money laundering” in connection with a related investigation.
At its peak, Euro Pacific had 8,000 depositors and more than $140 million in deposits, but did not take money from U.S. customers. Mr. Schiff had said the investigation and news reports led to customers withdrawing money from the bank, ultimately leading to its demise.
At a news conference last summer, an IRS official said tax authorities were investigating numerous investigations involving entities and individuals linked to the Euro Pacific.
Mr. Schiff said in his statement that he has lost millions as a result of the investigation and remains frustrated because “none of the reporters have retracted anything they wrote or said, nor has anyone apologized for the damage they caused.”
Kitty Bennett research contributed.