Gareth Vaughan

From what our experts that we spoke to have told us, from what I've seen, and from also what the Department of Internal Affairs, which was WorldClear's anti-money laundering supervisor, have said, is it was a pretty unique business model that they were operating in a New Zealand, within a New Zealand context at least.

Well, that's a good question.

And, I mean, obviously, you know, they, I mean, Hillary has said that they worked with, you know, entities that other banks wouldn't necessarily have.

So perhaps it was the type of operation, the jurisdiction they were from, various things.

Reasons, I think, for that.

Legitimate reasons.

that this company A is struggling to keep or open bank accounts.

So an employee sets up another company that it can use to move money.

So I sort of, I guess, for me, having, you know, written quite a lot about anti-money laundering requirements, I wrote a story that was kind of focused on this.

And I went to the Reserve Bank and I asked them, why are New Zealand banks allowing, you know, company A to move money through companies B's accounts?

And

the rbnz had made some comments while they probably didn't realize that the t1 um you know that t1 holdings linked back to world clear so i think that was the story i think that that richard saw um and that was probably something that other media at the time had covered it hadn't hadn't really looked at it was just this fascinating tale of you know new zealand man arrested in singapore and charged with stealing all this money um and that was part of the story but it wasn't i i didn't think it was the whole story

Well, so, I mean, Richard provided the data to me in, I believe from memory, April 2024.

So obviously, so he was released from Changi Prison in 2021 and things had largely gone quiet with WorldClear well before 2024.

So I sort of started looking at it and I just realised there's a lot here.

This is about events that happened a few years ago.

It is undoubtedly going to be interesting.

I had no idea of the scale of it.

So I didn't realize the business had been anywhere near as big as it actually was in terms of the volumes of, you know, we're talking tens of millions of dollars and various currencies and customers literally from every corner of the world.

Yeah.