Beauty and 'lord' keep shady company

BY MICHAEL FIELD

Stella Port-Louis, director of hundreds of New Zealand companies, has clear views about herself.

"Cool, honest, down to earth and friendly but that doesn't mean that I do not get upset!"

Ms Port-Louis, who turns 31 on January 28, lives in Victoria in the Seychelles, an Indian Ocean tax haven.

The Seychelles beauty heads hundreds of shell companies run out of an Auckland office, where another company is embroiled in an international arms-smuggling controversy with links to New Zealand.

Lotus Holding Company Ltd, for which she has worked since 2005, has clients who need companies set up discreetly in countries that do not ask many questions.

In New Zealand, it appears easier to form a company than sign up to a gym.

Ms Port-Louis, who has not replied to phone calls or emails, is a director of at least 338 New Zealand companies.

She attracted the attention of Barack Obama when he was a senator for the way she headed up at least 100 companies in Wyoming.

Her companies, with names like Petro Tex Ltd, El Mondo Ltd, London Group and Nelson Trading Ltd, are based at Level 5, 369 Queen St, Auckland.

A co-director at the same address is Lu Zhang, gender uncertain, who is the director of dozens of companies. One of them, SP Trading Ltd, rented a plane that was used to fly arms from North Korea to Iran, but it was seized by Thai authorities in Bangkok.

The New Zealand link has proven embarrassing to Wellington with the United States Justice Department expected to file indictments against whoever was behind SP Trading, believed to be a London-based client.

Lu Zhang may be little more than a figment of the imagination of a "professional client" in London who needed to hide their activities from the US, which has sanctions on North Korea and Iran. Providing just such a service is GT Group, based in Vanuatu, a Melanesian country that receives $18 million a year in New Zealand aid.

Vanuatu, like the Seychelles, is a no-questions-asked tax haven, or, as it likes to put it, centre for international business corporations.

GT Group is owned by accountant Geoffrey Taylor, who claims to be an English lord, and his family. It set up and owns Vicam (Auckland) Ltd, which appears to do nothing but clone itself into more than 1000 other entities, such as SP Trading.

In New Zealand, registering companies is easy but they do need a name, like Ms Port-Louis. GT employee Nesita Manceau, of Port Vila, may in fact rival Ms Port-Louis for directorships of New Zealand companies set up by them.

At the heart of all the operations is the simple fact that money, like water, finds the point of least resistance.

People around the world have long wanted to hide money and a long-time favourite was the legendary numbered Swiss bank account. From runaway German Nazis to corrupt African dictators, money could be banked with no questions asked.

Small countries like the Seychelles and Vanuatu started to get into it and made it a criminal offence for anybody in their country to say anything about IBC activities.

For New Zealanders, the best known of the IBCs were in the Cook Islands, exposed when MP Winston Peters tabled his "winebox" of documents.

After the 9/11 terror attacks in the US, the Financial Action Task Force, a watchdog outfit of the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, muscled many of the small IBC countries out of business.

But as the task force noted, in a report on New Zealand in October, most money laundering happened in financial systems where "the complexity usually depends on the sophistication of the offenders involved".

The task force says there is a "higher degree of sophistication in laundering the proceeds of crime now than in previous years".

Tax haven banks have been made to disclose the source and destination of money, in a bid to end the drug money laundering and financing of terrorism.

The task force says New Zealand's measures are generally robust but compliance with preventive measures "shows a number of essential gaps". A key recommendation is that the system needs to prove that people involved in it are "fit and proper".

Although there is no evidence that New Zealand's company system is caught up in illicit activities, the ability to simply and quickly create a company means it quickly becomes hard to find real owners. This is especially so if they want to hide – such as the London person who created SP Trading.

The problem with New Zealand's system is that, on the face of it, it has been used to frustrate the US and its sanctions on Iran and North Korea. Washington takes a dim view of the transgressions of friends.

Tonga found a friendly Greek businessman to set up a shipping "flags of convenience" operation. When it turned out the Tongan-flagged ships were al Qaeda fronts, an angry US had the operation closed down.

In the early 2000s, central Pacific country Nauru became an extreme version of the IBC-tax haven when the Russian Mafia moved their banking activities there.

At one point the Russian Central Bank claimed that more than $97 billion of the country's money had disappeared through 450 shell banks registered to a single Nauru box account owned by the Nauru Agency Corporation.

On Geoffrey Taylor's website he lists among his achievements working with the Nauru Agency Corporation. It's a small world.

THOUSANDS OF OFFICES IN SALLIES' BUILDING

The building at 369 Queen St, Auckland, the address of SP Trading, is owned by the Salvation Army.

Part of it is the church's northern area headquarters.

Level five, which can be reached only by those with swipe cards, is the registered office of thousands of companies working in space leased by Danite Corporate Offices, owned by Hobsonville lawyer Hans Sorensen and wife Fredda.

Mr Sorensen said the police had phoned him asking questions about companies on the floor. Danite had subleased the floor to his law firm, Sorensen Law, and to an an operation offering office space to short or long-term businesses.

"It is a serviced office, it has regular companies ... [and it] also has virtual offices," Mr Sorensen said.

A virtual office was a place in which the company had no actual office space but had a receptionist who answered a phone and passed on messages.

Mr Sorensen said GT Holdings were just "one of a number of people who are there".

He would not guess at how many companies were registered to the floor.

"What's their business is their businesses and I don't entertain what other people's businesses are about at all."

- © Fairfax NZ News