SFO makes announcement tied to ‘Ponzi scheme' company.
The Serious Fraud Office said name suppression for senior East Wind Company employee Yuko Hanyu had been dropped.
Hanyu faces six representative charges of false accounting linked to the company, and an additional charge of theft linked to a relationship. She has entered a plea of not guilty to all the charges.
Hanyu was the manager of East Wind’s finance department and worked at the company for 13 years from 2004 to December 2017.
The announcement from the SFO follows two deaths linked to the company described by the SFO as a Ponzi scam in 2020 and 2019.
East Wind Company was part of the East Wind Group. It marketed itself as offering financial services and immigration support to New Zealand’s Japanese community.
It collapsed in February 2019 and was put into liquidation, following the death of company director Masatomo Ashikaga (also known as Tom Tanaka). Company operations were closed by his widow Tui Tai Tsai (also known as Azalea Tsai) after concerns from creditors regarding the lack of director and New Zealand shareholders for the group.
The High Court appointed Grant Thornton as interim liquidator in April 2019, and as full liquidator a month later after bank account statements revealed significant sums had been transferred between the companies and a large discrepancy existed between the group’s assets and what funds investors had handed over.
The SFO. which opened an investigation in December 2019, alleged that financial products offered by the company such as the Group Term Deposit, Waterloo Fund, and Restaurant Fund, operated as Ponzi schemes involving more than $26 million of customer investments. Ashikaga was being investigated for allegedly scamming mostly Japanese nationals out of almost $45m.
Liquidators were unable to contact Ashikaga‘s widow Tsai directly, but she allowed access to some unorganised company records that were a mix of Japanese and English, as well as containing a number of inconsistencies. Liquidators later confirmed she had passed away in January 2020.
According to the most recent liquidators’ report, Basic Income (BINZ) received more than $674,000 in the six months to May 24, with payments mostly made for liquidators’ fees and legal costs. The company’s closing balance was more than half a million dollars.
The SFO urgently briefed its minister of the scandal and announced three months later it had reasonable grounds to believe an offence involving serious or complex fraud may have been committed.
Hanyu is due in Auckland District Court on March 2 for a case review.
