The news that Jacinda Ardern's government has recycled the proceeds of crime to the Mongrel Mob should not come as any surprise. It is thirty years since New Zealand's legal establishment began adapting its infrastructure so that dirty money could circulate.
As Leighton Associates has explained, at the centre of this is the use of the employment regulations to say that people can agree to commit crimes and that means they can do it and can't be held accountable. That was first set up by Helen Cull QC when she got High Court Justice Gallen to gag the press so they couldn't report a sexual harasser at a Wellington University.
Gagging the press about a sex pest was a new rule made up on the spot, but since the victim didn't argue, according to the Law Lady and her client, now there was a rule that judges could gag the press reporting wrongdoing and offences. That's the argument used by the lawyers and judges ever since. In other countries, that's contempt of Parliament, but the New Zealand Parliament has agreed to allow it, especially Andrew Little and Grant Robertson, the Ministers of Finance and Justice. They agreed to put it into law, and then they did.
So now it's law. Anyone can get gag orders against anyone who reports their crimes, if the crimes were confidential. Judges say they can ruin and imprison people for reporting crimes. And they do.
The Law Lady told everyone the gags were the results of the "common law of confidentiality". Some of them may even have believed her. But it wasn't true ... except in New Zealand. The reason it's not true that there is a law making offences "confidential" is that a country with a rule like that would be Corruption Central.
But if you are a lawyer that will take money to cover up corruption, that would be the ideal place to be, because you could get the corrupt officials to pay you to cover up their corruption. A bit like getting people who need to shift dirty money to pay you to clean it up by passing it through New Zealand, which as everyone knows is very clear.
The next move was to use the new rule to gag the press from reporting the Winebox Inquiry. Lucky for Ron Brierley, eh? We don't know whether the quick move to protect Ron Brierley was connected to the Law Lady's by arrangement between lawyers, or just the lawyers involved in the Winebox Inquiry noticing that the new Cull order would be very useful to them.
Ron Brierley was the man who "lent" his company money from the state-owned bank he was running. There were some complicated tax transactions with the Cook Islands and a company in Luxembourg. Ron and his mates got very rich from the taxpayers' money. Somehow the Serious Fraud Office didn't find anything wrong, and the taxpayer found something wrong with that.
Oh, the Serious Fraud Office?
The SFO was very new when the Law Lady made up the corruption gag rule. It was set up in 1990. It had as its Director the former Acting Chief Prosecutor for the British government in Hong Kong ...
... oh no, actually he was arrested in 1989, before he could take up his new post.
He was supposed to be prosecuting gangster criminals but they paid him not to. Like the Wellington University Sex Pest paying the Law Lady taxpayer money - but at least the Hong Kong criminals didn't pay off the corrupt lawyer with taxpayer money!
... wonder what happened to Warwick Reid after that? ...
He bought land in New Zealand in his wife's name with the bribe money. He got a shorter sentence for informing on his mates. He got a promise of no further prosecutions. Somehow the New Zealand press is silent about him, almost as though they were gagged.
And then ... New Zealand lawyers got the law changed so the British government could claw back the bribe money.
They changed the whole law, all over the world, to get what they wanted. Reid must have been totally pissed.
Reid was expert in money laundering, and no doubt he still is.
Only lawyers have legal privilege, which is how money laundering is generally done in New Zealand. Legal privilege allows lawyers to keep their client's information secret. They can make deals, suppress documents, transfer money ... The new MBIE rules are an extension of privilege rules to anyone, by allowing anyone to claim anything is "confidential" because they have agreed it is, either in a "Record of Settlement", which is signed off by MBIE and which MBIE judges have said means it can be enforced even if it is illegal (to be fair, one MBIE judge once said the opposite as well), or, now, in an employment agreement. So if you have an employment situation, you can use it to do fraud and corruption, and the employment judges have been given power (by Andrew Little MP and his mates) to send anyone who reports it to prison.
The MPs are now giving drug money to the Mongrel Mob. Perhaps they think it's theirs really.
Judge Cull who set it all up is now sitting in violence cases where the Mongrel Mob has killed people. We understand she has been taken off dishonesty cases, after a period when she persuaded other judges she only committed frauds as a lawyer because in New Zealand she had got rules made that let you get away with it. Since even bigger judges than her have agreed to that, it would not be possible for them to get rid of her without exposing themselves, which we understand they are not willing to do in public. In any event, getting away with fraud and laundering really is the law in New Zealand now.
Reid got struck off as a lawyer, so he couldn't have legal privilege any more ... except in employment matters as an employment advocate, but he couldn't have a privileged trust account ... he could do the deals and other lawyers could put it all through their trust accounts if need be.
In the 1990s, the whole world was beginning to realise that the best way to tackle grand scale corruption was to make sure people had to report it. That's what Anti-Money Laundering rules are. But New Zealand didn't sign up to that. Its lawyers were making a lot of money charging fees to launder money. New Zealand didn't get an Independent Commission Against Corruption (that was what Reid was involved with in Hong Kong) but it did set up the Serious Fraud Office ...
So the Serious Fraud Office started up in 1990 - without Reid. It had other staff, who didn't find anything wrong with Ron Brierley, chair of BNZ state-owned bank, taking taxpayer money for his private use. So Brierley was ok, even if the New Zealand public was't too happy. But they didn't really know what had gone on, because the SFO got Cull orders to suppress it.
Problems for the SFO started when somebody gave Winston Peters MP a winebox full of evidence of what Brierley and the SFO had done about Brierley. It didn't seem to be what New Zealand was telling the world the SFO was set up to do.
Winston Peters took that wine box of papers to Parliament. Parliament set up an inquiry about the SFO and the Cull orders suppressing it were made gagging the press. The press didn't complain, so what should have been a national scandal became a stronger rule for suppressing corruption.
Here's someone who was working at the SFO then. Anthony Drake. He is now a partner in the law firm Wynn Williams.
Anthony Drake advertises himself as an employment lawyer now. That's a strange thing for a fraud lawyer to be doing. Employment law is all about relationships and resolution, not technicalities. That's why employment law can be done by lay advocates.
Lawyers who can do fraud have to be good at technicalities - the sort that white collar criminals use. That's why lawyers make the best white collar criminals.
They can do their crimes in a really complicated way and make it look legal. It takes other lawyers to work it out. So you need those other lawyers to do the same crimes, so they don't tell on you.
Remember the Law Lady's new rule? If you've agreed it's "confidential", you can get a judge to make a gagging order?
Probably, to frighten people, all you have to do is say "It's confidential". If you have got lawyers all advising that "it's confidential" means you legally can't talk about it, then the press, big business, anyone who doesn't think for themselves and stand up for what's really right - they will all keep quiet.
For money laundering, everything went fine for twenty years after other countries started making it illegal. The way you make it illegal is you reverse the usual rule. Lawyers don't keep their client's affairs "confidential" if the client's transactions are "suspicious". Lawyers could never claim privilege protected fraud, but if they turned a blind eye, who would know? But Anti-Money Laundering means lawyers can't turn a blind eye
In 2009, New Zealand passed an Anti-Money Laundering law. It wasn't activated - nobody had to obey it - so there was time to prepare, before it did get activated, if it ever did. Meanwhile, lawyers could keep using the Cull rule and claiming it was "common law".
Who realised first that if you have a way to get judges to cover up crime, you can get away with anything? The idea of paying people off for crimes started by covering up sex crimes, which weren't taken very seriously until the # MeToo movement. If your boss sexually harassed you before that, even if he was a rapist, lawyers would shut you up. We saw that with Harvey Weinstein, who is now in prison and his lawyer is being prosecuted. His lawyer had fears for his life about the case ...
The Law Lady's client claims to be an expert in reinterpreting laws. After he was given his job back, his own boss needed to cover up some "misstatements" on his cv. The boss started giving his job to the Law Lady's client, with whom she was very close friends. Within a few years, the "expert" and his boss were advising a government organisations, including Crown Law.
A coverup system was already in place for offences, and all the employment lawyers had to do was make sure they could use it.
In the Law Lady's Wellington University coverup back in 1991, the female victim had agreed to a "confidential" investigation of her complaints. The Law Lady and Justice Gallen used that "confidentiality" as a pretext for a court order.
Employment "settlements" were confidential, and confidentiality would be enforced by a judge, so employment lawyers like Anthony Drake and his mate Sam Hood claimed that anything in an employment settlement was confidential and enforceable.
New Zealand's law about employment settlements wasn't very carefully drafted. It wasn't too hard to "reinterpret" it to say that employment settlements could be enforced even if they were illegal.
All you needed was for employment lawyers and judges to agree they could make orders that overruled the law. Or that they could make new laws allowing offences ... but only to certain people. The coverup orders would be made on individual applications, when somebody stood up to the informal "it's confidential". So if, confidentially, someone was stealing money or running a procurement fraud, or stalking or threatening victims, it was all "confidential". The lawyers could get the "confidentiality" enforced.
Once those people had legal permission to steal money, or launder it ... those transactions couldn't be reported as "suspicious" because they were "confidential" and couldn't be reported at all. Andrew Little MP went on international telly to tell the world that New Zealand suppression had to be obeyed. He got the government of Canada to have talks with him. He got Google to change its practices (not much - everybody actually knows about these frauds and sex offences, and it's very difficult to get a computer algorithm to pretend it doesn't).
If the launderers had only stuck to laundering, Leighton Associates might never have explained to its readers how New Zealand's descent into corruption started with a Law Lady looking after her sex pest friend. That's because laundering is done by consent between the parties and the lawyers.
Laundering really is done by people who agree it will be "confidential". The lawyers who do laundering are really keen not to report their clients, because the clients are paying them to do their business in secret.
The mistake the employment lawyers made was not chalking up the Law Lady and the Sex Pest as just a step on the way to having a system for hiding corruption, like Ron Brierley lending himself taxpayer money free of charges. The employment lawyers could have just taken private money for laundering, and got orders making the laundering "confidential". Both parties in those transactions would have kept quiet, because those are consensual transactions.
Instead, the employment lawyers carried on covering up offences against employee victims as well. And employee victims don't consent. And then managers realised they could use it to take taxpayer money, like Ron Brierley, and pay more taxpayer money to private lawyers to cover that up.
Probably nobody would have taken any notice of Geoffrey Brown if he'd been left alone to protest about corruption in the Tauranga City Council.
Instead, the Tauranga City Council paid a lawyer (Matthew Ward-Johnson) to bring cases against him to destroy him. They had already paid Geoffrey Brown's own lawyer to advise him to agree to the coverup, not that Geoffrey Brown realised that - because Geoffrey Brown knew you can't cover up crimes. He just didn't know the legal system in New Zealand had become corrupt.
The wins of lawyers like Ward-Johnson showed the judges to be corrupt all the way up to the Court of Appeal. They all agreed to anonymise the cases where Geoffrey Brown was gradually destroyed by the Tauranga City Council and the employment members and judges. Except Ward-Johnson was negligent and forgot to ask, and the Court of Appeal had a shred of honesty about the democratic principles of open justice, so it exposed the whole thing. Not that people didn't know anyway.
As the members and judges became more and more publicly corrupted, the employment lawyers got drunk on their power to destroy people. They started threatening to ruin people if they told on them. As their lawyers became more and more powerful, and even became judges, the New Zealand legal system became so corrupted it was impossible for anyone to tackle. Even Transparency International was too scared to tell!
But New Zealand does have some honest people who will stand up for what is right. We think there are honest judges and honest MPs. We think there are even honest lawyers. We think there are too many whose honesty has been messed up by believing fake advisors. We even think the Cull orders might have started as just lawyers and judges not thinking, but helping their mates and their mates' mates out of trouble. Isn't that how legal corruption usually starts?
We think there are now some very scared lawyers, judges and MPs out there. New Zealand's corruption and money laundering policies are now there for everyone to see. Giving criminal money back to a criminal organisation is only the tip of the iceberg.
Don't believe us? watch this space ...
They (the corrupt lawyers) should have known that sooner or later somebody would stand up to them. They saw it with Matthew Ward-Johnson getting Geoffrey Brown sent to prison for exposing corruption in the Tauranga City Council, so they got the judges to go even further than the Law Lady at that point. Judges Christina Inglis and Bruce Corkill sent him to prison because he wouldn't keep corruption "confidential". Judge Bruce Corkill admitted publicly and proudly what he was doing and claimed it was done under his "judicial oath".
They saw it with Cull and her clients Gordon Stewart and Tony Smith getting away with using fake documents to get orders, because the fakes were "confidential", and she was supported by judges all the way up. Wellington University still employs them, Gordon Stewart stripped of his academic titles and sent back to administration, but Tony Smith still on a professor's salary. After you've advised Crown Law, the Attorney-General and Andrew Little MP how to legalise corruption, and they've acted on your advice, we can see they can hardly sack you. Even if you are a proved forger who should have retired ten years ago.
They saw it with Ana Shaw and Allan Halse, and that's where Anthony Drake was the first to put the Cull principle into action.
If fraud is "confidential", that means it's confidential for everyone. Nobody can talk about it. Anthony Drake and Turuki Healthcare sued Allan Halse and Tracey Simposon for talking about Turuki's internal finances. Tracey Simpson asked Ministers to investigate. Anthony Drake got fines against them both, first from member Crichton and then from Judge Holden. The same Joanna Holden who supported MBIE buying off Peter Whittall with insurance fraud money when she was at Crown Law. The Supreme Court said what she did there was illegal in administrative law, but in the employment courts it is legal, so the Attorney-General gave her a new job, where she could use illegal powers and enforce them.
Instead, Tauranga City Council paid a lawyer (Matthew Ward-Johnson) to bring cases against him to destroy him. They had already paid Geoffrey Brown's own lawyer to advise him to agree to the coverup, not that Geoffrey Brown realised that - because Geoffrey Brown knew you can't cover up crimes. He just didn't know the legal system in New Zealand had become corrupt.
Sam Hood, Anthony Drake's mate, sued Allan Halse in the Rangiura cases, for exposing wrongful conduct by Rangiura. He built a whole case on a "non-identification order". Leighton Associates were in court when Judge Perkins realised there was no such thing in the employment legislation. He realised Sam Hood had tricked him that there was a coverup system in the employment legislation and he spoke about it. Leighton Associates have seen the court papers and we have no doubt that both Sam Hood and Judge Perkins knew that what they were doing was illegal, and that Judge Perkins knew his coverup order was illegal. We do accept he may have thought he really was above the law.
Maybe the most serious episodes are where coverups have been used for their original purposes of covering up personal offences. Newsroom started reporting on coverups and the same happened to them. They reported responsibly, after discussions with Crown Law. Then Crown Law turned on them, through its Director Una Jagose (the sister of a High Court judge) and Judge Francis Cooke (close mate of Tony Smith), who started the same process used by Judges Corkill and Inglis against Geoffrey Brown. First, financial orders for exposing secret iniquity. Then ...
More and more is coming out about the abuses committed by Oranga Tamariki. One of them is getting gagging orders against Susan Kennedy, a former employee. That's brought in more members but the same Judge Joanna Holden again.
More and more is coming out about the abuses committed by lawyers and advocates. New Zealand isn't safe for employees any more.
But it is safe for crooks and launderers, because crimes are now "confidential".
That corruption is what gave birth to Leighton Associates. And why we now report on Money Laundering as well as Employment Law. They go together.
So now corruption is part of the legal system, and MPs have supported it. Many things about what they have done surprise us, but not MPs giving dirty money back to the Mongrel Mob.