How do you hide $55
million dollars?
Hatsue and Yoshiko were the
daughters of a very wealthy man. One day they
would inherit his fortune. They would pay a very
large tax bill.
‘It’s not fair,’ their father
told them. ‘It’s your money.’
‘But what can we do?’
‘Take the money out now,’ he told them.
‘Then it won’t be there when I die.’
The sisters began taking money out of their
father’s bank accounts.
‘We’ll hide it at home,’ Hatsue told
Yoshiko. ‘That way the tax authorities
won’t know about it.’
Where's the money?
Every month they
withdrew large amounts of money in
cash. And when their father
died there was very little left money in his bank
accounts.
The sisters only needed to declare only a small part of
the family fortune. They did not mention that they also
had nearly 58 million US dollars in new bank notes.
But the tax authorities became suspicious. Their father
had been a very successful property developer. Where
was all his money?
‘He spent it all!’ said the sisters.
The tax authorities remained unconvinced. And when the
police investigated, they soon discovered the missing
millions.
‘They hid most of the money in cash in a shed
attached to Hatsue's house,’ an Osaka tax
official said. ‘We have confiscated 50 cardboard
boxes packed with cash.’
I Forgot
When the police found the
boxes of bank notes, Hatsue looked surprised: ‘I
had forgotten about that money,’ she said.
‘I put it there when I was tidying up the
house.’
For some reason the police didn’t believe her.
They charged the sisters with the biggest tax evasion
in Japanese history.