FRANK Lowy's worst nightmare appeared as a silhouette on a video screen yesterday in Room 106, a cavernous hearing room in the Dirksen Senate Building on Capitol Hill in Washington DC.

Speaking with a clipped Swiss accent, the man who was once known as Heinrich Kieber, a diligent IT specialist at the LGT banking group in the tax haven of Liechtenstein, was now simply a darkened figure against a blue-grey backlit background.

Kieber fears for his life and now lives like a character in a spy thriller - only this one is true. After stealing thousands of documents of LGT's customer details, he shopped them to the world's tax authorities.

According to a US congressional report based on evidence gleaned from the documents Kieber stole, Lowy, Australia's second-richest man, and his sons David, Peter and Steven, allegedly used Liechtenstein to conceal tens of millions of dollars from the Australian tax office.

While Frank Lowy acknowledges being audited by the ATO arising from information in the documents, he completely denies the conclusions about his tax affairs made in the congressional report. According to the report, one of the documents, an internal LGT memo, reveals the Lowys, who control the global shopping chain Westfield, wanted to set up a foundation "with conservative investments that would serve as 'insurance' for the Lowy family".

The report says the documents "make it clear that LGT was aware that Mr Lowy and his sons were hiding assets in the new foundation from Australian tax authorities". And they add that the Lowys "took a number of measures" to keep the foundation, and their relationship with the bank, secret.

Now it's Kieber's turn for secrecy.

For about 15 minutes in pre-recorded testimony yesterday to the Senate's permanent subcommittee on investigations, Kieber never turned his head, looking down - as presumably he was coached to do - so not once was there a chance to see his profile.

Kieber, 43, is now in a witness protection program. Anonymous parties using the internet have put a $US10 million ($10.28million) reward on his head and the rumours are drug cartels would be willing to pay a much higher price for his head.

He has a new name and it is reasonable to assume a disguise when in public since the silhouetted head and ears on show yesterday were certainly that of the man whose photo is splashed across Liechtenstein's police website: an angular, thin man, 185cm tall, balding and bespectacled. The Liechtenstein warrant calls for his immediate arrest and extradition for stealing business secrets and selling them abroad.

Kieber was convicted of fraud and theft in Liechtenstein over stolen customer details in January 2004 and received a suspended three-year jail sentence. It was not the first time he had had a run-in with the law: he once passed a bogus cheque in 1996 in Spain to buy an apartment, for which he was finally convicted in 2001 and ordered to pay restitution.

The intersection of that personal crisis and a job that gave him access to documents spelling out the legal machinations of the world's wealthiest people using a known tax shelter was clearly an epiphany of sorts for Kieber.

Kieber's job was to scan thousands of paper documents. Seeing first-hand how wealthy individuals conducted their own affairs - tax scams hiding millions of dollars of assets - left Kieber, by his own admission yesterday, with a growing sense of outrage. He plotted his revenge.

As part of Kieber's suspended sentence deal for stealing the bank's data in the first place, he was obliged to return all of the data to the bank.

In the oddly rarefied world within the principality of Liechtenstein, population 35,000, it appears not to have dawned on anyone what any swindler worth their weight would do next given the leverage that the information represented.

Kieber made copies of everything and smuggled them out of Liechtenstein, and started offering them for sale to tax authorities which in turn have proven they, too, can adopt large dollops of moral equivalence in the knowledge that a greater good is being served.

The German Government paid Kieber $US6.8 million for the information and Britain reportedly paid Germany $US204,000 for the names of about 100 Britons on the list.

The Australian Taxation Office, too, got hold of the documents and in February announced 20 new audit cases based on them. In all, Kieber triggered tax probes across 14 countries based on some 1400 names in the documents.

The ATO's announcement of the investigations was a confirmation that more Australians, not just the Lowys, are caught in Kieber's trap. To be sure, beware the disgruntled IT guy.

Carl Levin, the chairman of the committee, declined to comment when asked by The Weekend Australian yesterday if he could divulge any more names. Similarly he declined to say why the Lowy family - which has extensive US interests and includes a US citizen in Frank Lowy's son Peter - was specifically chosen to be aired in the committee's explosive 115-page document rather than some of the 100 or so US individuals understood to be on the committee's radar.

But any Australian individuals who held accounts with LGT will be rightly nervous, if not already in discussion with the ATO - like the Lowys, who took the unusual step of revealing this week they are co-operating with an ATO audit based on the documents.

The Lowys vehemently deny they have done anything improper, but the statement released this week did not deny the links with LGT. In turn, there has been no explanation of the relationship with LGT which, based on the committee's report and the weight of evidence it contains, was an institution involved in systematic tax evasion on behalf of its clients.

Nor was there any explanation of three meetings the Lowys held in Sydney, Los Angeles and London in 1996 and 1997 with LGT representatives - meetings that the documents reveal were unusual since LGT usually required its clients to travel to the bank or nearby Switzerland to discuss an account. A memo detailing the meeting in London with the Lowys was even copied to Liechtenstein's Prince Phillip - the principality's royal family owns the bank.

It was witnessing LGT's interaction with clients that prompted Kieber to take his stand, he revealed yesterday. His video testimony was his first chance to explain his side of the story since it emerged in February that tax authorities around the world were swooping, thanks to the documents he pilfered. There was no mention of his own chequered past, just his own outrage.

"To be able to index the documents, we had to read every single one on our screens," Kieber said. "It was then I began to realise the very questionable business the LGT was often involved in and the dubious clients they were serving, the kind of business that goes beyond just facilitating massive tax evasion."

He said he got a very clear picture of the sometimes sophisticated and simple tricks used to hide assets from not only the taxman but other law enforcement agencies and people who "may have a legal right to it or interest in it".

Kieber said he was also involved in IT training of the 85 staff members of the LGT Trust, including the chief executive and board members.

"When I was teaching the CEO or a member of the board or a trust client adviser, I confronted them about the LGT's questionable practices that I have seen in many files," he said.

"Sometimes I always raised this topic with foundations' bank account managers from the LGT Bank. All these discussions were about files with strong indication to corruption, links to dictators, or business deals to avoid a US embargo, for example.

"The answer was always the same: none of your business. Just stick to your designated job."

Kieber did that and more, saying he "obtained copies of data of every legal entity and, furthermore, copies of vast internal documents before I left the company".

That means that the Lowys will almost certainly not be the last Australians to attract some unwelcome publicity.

www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,24042867-2702,00.html