Gareth Vaughan

And so, but they owned their holdings in WorldClear through companies.

So Magnuson had a Seychelles company and Trujillo had a company in Hong Kong.

So when you look up the New Zealand Companies Office, you'll see their company names rather than their individual names.

The World Bank used to do this ease of doing business survey, and New Zealand was always at the top of it.

New Zealand was viewed, out of 183 economies, New Zealand was the easiest place in which to start a company.

That's very attractive.

It's very attractive for business people, right?

So anyone who wants to set up a company, legitimate business, it's fantastic.

It's great and it's brilliant.

But it does mean that there may be people out there whose reasoning may not be completely wholesome.

It's easy for them to do as well.

So Worldclear registered as a New Zealand company and then it registered as a New Zealand financial service provider.

And registering as a financial service provider of itself doesn't mean you're actually regulated.

That's a separate issue.

So there are some areas where you can register as a New Zealand financial service provider and provide certain financial services directly.

internationally and you're not actually regulated in new zealand so effectively what they were able to do is they weren't a bank you know they didn't do anything wrong in the way they set the company up at all they followed all the rules and you can effectively operate as a bank internationally but you're obviously not licensed by the reserve bank so you're not you know officially a bank but you can offer the same type of services internationally

So this is, by international standards, this is quite light touch.

And so, you know, Michael Magnusson, who prior to his days as a WorldClear shareholder, he had a company and corporation business and he incorporated a lot of New Zealand financial service providers on behalf of clients around the world.

And he actually wrote a book in 2013 that was called How to Start a Bank with $1,000.

You know, the land without a banking law.