The Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC) is investigating the failure of the family of Malaysian tycoon Taib Mahmud to comply with its disclosure laws, but has stopped short of pursuing corruption allegations.
The billionaire politician is under investigation for corruption in Malaysia and faces allegations his family companies have laundered millions of dollars through the Australian real estate market, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
As revealed in Fairfax Media in September, the billionaire politician is under investigation for corruption in Malaysia and faces allegations his family companies have laundered millions of dollars through the Australian real estate market.
The allegations against the family of Sarawak governor Taib Mahmud are contained in a report by anti-corruption campaigners in Switzerland, concerned with logging of rainforests in Borneo and displacement of its indigenous people.
Under Taib's governorship, almost 90 per cent of Sarawak's native rainforests have been logged. Despite his modest income as a politician, the family of Taib Mahmud have interests in more than 400 companies in 25 countries.
In its report, The Adelaide Hilton Case – how a Malaysian politician's family laundered $30 million in South Australia, the Bruno Manser Fund, a Swiss non-government organisation, exposed the corporate connections of the Taib family in Australia.
The report questions how the Taib family could afford to finance the purchase of a major hotel. It also questions a key loan in the deal, which totalled some $30 million in the early 1990s.
Taib's daughter, Jamilah Taib based in Ottawa and reputed to be the richest woman in Canada, and her husband became shareholders of an Australian company, Sitehost, after the family bought shares worth $9.5 million in 1993.
In the following year, Sitehost acquired Adelaide's $50 million Hilton Hotel but it failed to lodge financial statements for the eight years to 2006. Its most recent set of accounts, moreover, is for the year 2011.
In its response to petitions for an investigation from Bruno Manser, the Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC) said it had appointed a "specialist team" to investigate the failure of the Taib family to lodge accounts in accordance with the Corporations Act. It would consider, said the letter, whether the company's conduct warranted "enforcement action".
The Asian Pacific Post reported in 2014 a major real estate development controlled by Jamilah Taib and her husband in Ottawa, had been secretly funded by the family of Sarawak governor Abdul Taib Mahmud.
The claims were stated in book by Lukas Straumann, , who also heads the Swiss-based Bruno Manser Fund. It claimed that Sarawak Governor Abdul Taib, his four children and his siblings have stakes in 333 companies in Malaysia and in another 418 spread around the globe.
Logging in Sarawak, for long the world's largest exporter of tropical timbers, has been controversial since the mid-1980s. Some of the world's largest timber conglomerates, including Rimbunan Hijau and Samling, have their origins in Sarawak and are currently active all over the globe.
Straumann, presented documents alleging close financial ties between the Taib family and Sakto corporation, an Ottawa-based real estate group. 
Straumann presented evidence on a mortgage loan over CAN$ 20 million granted to Sakto by the Taib family in 1996 for the company’s Preston Street development in Ottawa’s Little Italy. 
Sakto, which is directed by Taib’s daughter and her Canadian husband, controls three office towers and a residential building at Preston appraised at more than CAN$ 200 million.
Other documents showed that Taib’s late wife, Laila, purchased a private property in Ottawa’s Rockcliffe Park for CAN$ 945,000 in 1989. The mansion was later given for free to Taib daughter Jamilah and her husband Sean Murray.
The documents are additional evidence supporting Straumann’s claim that the Taib family has secretly transferred hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit assets from the Malaysian state of Sarawak to family properties in Canada, the US, Australia and the United Kingdom. The Taib family holds stakes in over 400 companies in 25 countries. Their stake in 14 Malaysian companies alone has been calculated at USD 1.2 billion.
Straumann criticized the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) for their inaction on the Taib case
“We alerted FINTRAC and the RCMP back in 2010 on the Taib family’s illicit businesses in Canada. While Malaysia’s Anti Corruption Commission MACC has opened a case against Taib, the RCMP have not committed to anything. Despite repeated letters and e-mails to the officers in charge, the RCMP were not even willing to meet us to discuss the Taib family case.“