Actor Paul Hogan has been given permission to leave Australia after a travel ban placed on him by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) was lifted, his lawyers say.
Hogan and the ATO have reached agreement on terms which will allow the actor to return to his family in LA, his lawyer Andrew Robinson said in a statement on Friday afternoon.
"While the commissioner and Mr Hogan remain in dispute on more general taxation issues, Mr Hogan continues to protest his innocence and denies any wrongdoing," Mr Robinson said in a statement.
Agreement was reached following a "cordial and cooperative meeting" between lawyers for the ATO and Hogan, Mr Robinson said.
The ATO, which has demanded Hogan pay an alleged multimillion dollar tax debt, served him with a departure prohibition order in mid-August when he returned to Australia for his mother's funeral.
Hogan, 70, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife Linda Kozlowski and their son Chance, was banned from leaving the country until the dispute was settled.
Mr Robinson told AAP on Thursday that Hogan was hopeful of resolving his differences with the ATO, after receiving a letter from them on Wednesday.
Mr Robinson said the tax office had based its tax evasion case against the Crocodile Dundee star around a disgruntled former financial controller who had worked for Hogan.
"The tax office case is ... hugely based on a disgruntled, fired ex-financial controller of Hogan's who has made inconsistent statements and is now shopping around for immunity - that's their principal witness," Mr Robinson told the Nine Network on Wednesday morning.
"We are still hopeful that we'll get a response... from the tax office and Paul can go back to his family - Chance starts a new school in a week's time and Paul wants to be there for that moment."
Hogan has insisted he has already paid too much tax in Australia and is the victim of a witch hunt.
"If I was a tax evader which I'm not, I must be the dumbest one in the world," he told the Nine Network on Tuesday.
"I keep coming back here to the country, and instead of fleeing to a tax haven, I fled to the United States of America."
At the time, Hogan said he was grateful for the support people had given him but said he didn't want sympathy.
"I want not to get special treatment," he said.
"I'm just Hoges and all I ever wanted was a fair go."

Immigration has no “significant” effect on the number of jobs available to U.S.-born workers and helps boost incomes and productivity over time, according to a paper by an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

“There is no evidence that immigrants crowd out U.S.-born workers in either the short or long run,” Giovanni Peri, an associate professor at the University of California-Davis and a visiting scholar at the San Francisco Fed, said in the paper released today. “Data show that, on net, immigrants expand the U.S. economy’s productive capacity, stimulate investment, and promote specialization that in the long run boosts productivity.”

Immigrants, who tend to be less educated and lack English- language skills, allow U.S.-born workers with similar levels of education to shift toward more communications-intensive jobs, which generally pay better, Peri said. Also, a growing workforce prompts companies to expand and upgrade equipment, making the economy more productive, he said.

An inflow of immigrants equal to 1 percent of the increase in employment helps boost overall incomes by 0.6 percent to 0.9 percent, according to Peri’s research. That means that immigration pushed wages up by $5,100 on average from 1990 to 2007 after adjusting for inflation, accounting for 20 percent to 25 percent of the gain during those years, he said.

The paper comes as U.S. hiring shows signs of cooling. A Labor Department report on Sept. 3 may show that private payroll rose by 47,000 this month after a 71,000 gain in July, and the unemployment rate rose to 9.6 percent, according to the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

“The painfully slow recovery in the labor market has restrained growth in labor income, raised uncertainty about job security and prospects, and damped confidence,” Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said at the Kansas City Fed’s annual monetary symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, on Aug. 27.

U.S. officials are investigating the cause of a fire yesterday on a Mariner Energy Inc. oil and natural-gas platform in the Gulf of Mexico that initially drew parallels with the BP Plc spill disaster. The U.S. Department of the Interior and Coast Guard will look into what triggered the fire that burned for several hours and forced the evacuation of 13 workers, Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer John Edwards said yesterday. The fire started on or near upper-deck living quarters and was not caused by an explosion, Patrick Cassidy, a spokesman for Mariner Energy, said in an e-mail. The company said oil and gas production from the wells controlled by the platform, known as Vermilion 380, has been shut down. “I don’t know what kind of work they were doing that may have caused it,” Coast Guard Captain Peter Troedsson said yesterday at a press conference in New Orleans. Coast Guard vessels and aircraft are scanning the sea around the platform about 90 miles (145 kilometers) off the Louisiana coast for signs of oil, he said. A mile-long (1.6-kilometer), 100-foot-wide sheen of oil was sighted near the platform, which stands in less than 400 feet of water, the Coast Guard said earlier yesterday, citing a report from Houston-based Mariner. Dashed Hopes? The fire may dash oil-industry efforts to resume deep- water exploration less than five months after the BP rig explosion killed 11 workers, triggered the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history and prompted a moratorium on deep- water drilling, said Gianna Bern, president of Brookshire Advisory & Research Inc. “This incident will increase pressure on the federal government to prolong the moratorium,” said Bern, a former BP crude oil trader whose Flossmoor, Illinois, firm provides risk-management advice to oil producers. While there are differences between the Mariner fire and the BP disaster -- no loss of life, the blaze was on a production platform not a drilling rig, and is in water 15 times shallower -- regulators will be concerned, Bern said. “I don’t think it’s going to matter much to regulators that this wasn’t a deep-water installation and that nobody got hurt. Scrutiny of the whole industry will intensify.” Mariner, which agreed in April to be acquired by Apache Corp., tumbled as much as 16 percent in New York trading yesterday in the hours after the accident. Oil futures rose yesterday on concern the incident will prompt a federal crackdown on offshore production. The Gulf supplies 30 percent of domestic oil output and 13 percent of U.S. gas production. Platform v Drilling Production platforms tend to be less prone to blowouts or spills than drilling rigs because they’re tapping into geological formations that have already been tamed with steel piping, concrete and pressure-control devices, said Arthur Berman, a consultant and geologist who lives near Houston. Rigs drill into unexplored layers of rock, salt and sand laced with pockets of high-pressure, explosive gas. The only methods drillers have for holding unexpected pressure surges at bay are heavy drilling fluid and a stack of valves on the seafloor, Berman said. Lee Hunt, president of the International Association of Drilling Contractors in Houston, said the differences between the BP and Mariner incidents won’t prevent the latest fire from “fueling the passions” of people who oppose oil exploration. “I think we’re very close to restoring some imagery of the safety of drilling operations, and now we have an event that points to the production operations,” Hunt said. “It’s just a different set of circumstances. One’s an automobile and one’s a truck.” Apache Proceeds Apache intends to proceed with its $2.4 billion acquisition of Mariner, said Bill Mintz, a spokesman for the Houston-based buyer. The cash-and-stock deal was announced five days before BP’s April 20 rig explosion. Mariner operates seven wells in the Vermilion 380 field. Proved reserves were estimated at 33.2 billion cubic feet of gas equivalent at the end of 2009 and were about 47 percent oil and 53 percent gas and gas liquids. Production last year was equivalent to 1.1 billion cubic feet of gas, Mariner said in a public filing. Mariner dropped 60 cents, or 2.6 percent, to $22.75 as of the 4 p.m. close of New York composite trading yesterday after trading as low as $19.62 earlier yesterday. The stock had more than doubled in value this year before yesterday. Apache, the largest independent U.S. oil and gas producer, fell 1.3 percent to $91.30. BP lost more than half its market value in the weeks after the explosion aboard Transocean Ltd.’s Deepwater Horizon rig, which the oil producer leased to drill the Macondo well. Helicopter Rescue Crude oil for October delivery rose $1.11, or 1.5 percent, to $75.02 a barrel yesterday after declining as much as 1.1 percent before the Mariner fire. Gas futures fell 0.3 percent. Bristow Group Inc., a helicopter company that shuttles workers and equipment to offshore rigs and platforms, spotted the fire during a routine flight earlier yesterday, Kade Monlezun, a manager at the Houston-based company, said in a telephone interview. Bristow alerted the Coast Guard and Mariner to the fire, he said. The rescued workers were transported to Terrebonne General Medical Center in Houma, Louisiana, Monlezun said. The Coast Guard dispatched seven helicopters, two airplanes and four cutters to Mariner’s platform, which began production in 1982, according to the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.