‘Fraud, money laundering’: Inside the Hillsong papers
A cache of leaked financial documents alleges staggering misconduct and outrageous spending at the Australian megachurch.
On Thursday, March 9, independent MP Andrew Wilkie stood in parliament and announced that he was tabling a giant cache of documents alleging financial malfeasance by the Australian megachurch Hillsong.
“Last year a whistleblower provided me with financial records and board papers that show that Hillsong is breaking numerous laws in Australia and around the world relating to fraud, money laundering and tax evasion,” he said. “For example, this document shows how, in 2021, four members of the Houston family and their friends enjoyed a three-day luxury retreat in Cancún, Mexico, using $150,000 of church money. These other documents show former leader Brian Houston treating private jets like Ubers –again, all with church money.”
So voluminous is the cache of documents – many thousands of pages – that it took parliamentary staff more than a week to scan them all for public access.
They include swaths of financial statements and bank records, and allegedly detail conspicuous personal enrichment, relatively paltry expenditure on good deeds, as well as tax evasion and the systemic rorting of tax exemptions. “By publicly exposing definitive evidence of Hillsong’s improper state of affairs, it will help educate the public to be more vigilant with their due diligence when considering donating to Hillsong and other organisations like it,” the unnamed whistleblower wrote in a disclosure statement, which was also tabled.
“Vulnerable members of the community need to know not to place unbridled trust in an organisation simply because – in fact, because – it is classified as a religious organisation. Techniques used by Pentecostal mega-churches such as a Hillsong to solicit money from their congregation (with no reciprocal visibility into how the money was actually spent) can be considered spiritually and emotionally manipulative, often resulting in vulnerable congregation members making great sacrifices in their personal lives to