Gareth Vaughan

Do they do that in other countries?

Well, yes, I think some do that.

New Zealand's regulations in this area have come in for some criticism from the global anti-money laundering watchdog, which is called the Financial Action Task Force.

So they do these evaluations of countries every few years, and the last one they did of New Zealand was in 2021.

And one weakness that they have flagged is that there's no requirement for a financial service provider or a company like Wellclear to vet minority shareholders.

So, you know, you had this guy called, he was then called Carl Michael Magnusson.

He's subsequently gone to Mikael Magnusson.

And he actually, while he was a world clear shareholder, he was sentenced to nine years in prison in Panama on money laundering charges.

Now, he'd left Panama by that point, and he's now living in Stockholm in his native Sweden.

And there's an Interpol Red Notice that's been out for him since 2023.

But Sweden will not extradite its citizens to countries outside the European Union.

So he's sitting there in Stockholm, like as our partner at Mattias Karlsson at Expressen, who was one of the, he was our key Magnuson expert because he's been tracking him.

He's in Sweden.

He's a Swede as well.

And he wrote in one of his articles that he's written that, you know, the people who are

supposed to be keeping an eye on what Magnusson was up to, were literally a few blocks away from where Magnusson's been living and had no idea he was even there.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

And then the second minority shareholder is a Venezuelan guy called Arturo Jose Trujillo Villalobos.

So we discovered that he had in fact been convicted in 1999 of conspiracy to sell forged Venezuelan government bonds, which, you know, is an unusual crime, I would have thought.