• Ye ‘Cathay’ Hua laundered at least $18 million for Xavier Valent’s drug syndicate.
• Hua is now in prison, serving a sentence of seven and a half years.
• An ‘innocent’ investor in Hua’s enterprise has tried and failed to get back $61,400 she needs for a house deposit.

An investor who unknowingly put more than $60,000 into a company run by convicted large-scale money-launderer Ye “Cathay” Hua has been locked in a complicated court battle to try to get her money back for a house deposit.

Min Hu’s nest egg is a comparatively tiny amount in the hundreds of millions of dollars Hua’s foreign exchange company handled. It is also insignificant compared with the $27.5 million police said Hua earned through her illegal activity.

But it means a lot to Hu – about $12,000 of the $61,400 she says Hua owes her was a wedding gift from her parents in China.

Now she wants her money back to put a deposit on a house – but at the moment, that looks unlikely.

Hua is serving a prison sentence of seven and a half years after being found guilty of 15 charges of money laundering.

The police, meanwhile, are going after her assets, which they want to confiscate under the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act 2009.

And even the police can’t find most of the money that was funnelled through Hua’s Qian DuoDuo Ltd (QDD), which traded as the Lidong Foreign Exchange in Newmarket.

They have obtained a restraining order which allows them to seize up to $27.5m. They have been able to access only $4.25m.

Min Hu is not the only one out of pocket.

Court documents say she is one of 14 “legitimate and innocent” investors who collectively are owed nearly $1.5m by QDD.

Hu filed a suit in the High Court trying to “sever and exclude” a fraction of the money subject to the restraining order, so that her investment could be paid back to her.

She was unsuccessful.

A recent decision by High Court Justice Michele Wilkinson-Smith found that Min Hu did not have a “legal interest” in the assets.

Instead, she has a “claim in contract” which she will have to pursue through further court action at a later date.

The jail term imposed on Cathay Hua, sometimes dubbed the Newmarket Money Lady, was the longest ever imposed in New Zealand for her type of offending.

At a trial in 2023, the judge concluded she laundered at least $18m in dirty cash for Xavier Valent, whose international crime syndicate flooded New Zealand with methamphetamine and other drugs in the 2010s.

Cathay Hua was sometimes known as the Newmarket Money Lady.

Unfortunately for Min Hu, it has not been possible to trace her money in the labyrinth of funds, accounts and cryptocurrency which made up Hua’s business.

Police told the High Court that just because Hu deposited funds into an account controlled by Ye Hua, it did not follow that she obtained an interest in all accounts controlled by Hua on a global basis.

“Min Hu is an after-school care provider and does not have access to significant amounts of funds,” the court judgment said.

“As such, waiting for forfeiture applications and orders is financially burdensome to her and her husband.

Money needed for house deposit

“There is some current urgency because Min Hu wishes to buy a house and needs access to her funds in order to raise the deposit,” the judgment said.

“The situation is very unfortunate for Min Hu,” Justice Wilkinson-Smith said.

“She invested in a company expecting a financial return. Investment carries risk.”

Justice Wilkinson-Smith said it was possible the court would grant relief to her and the other “innocent investors” at the point where the police’s forfeiture application was considered.

But she said Min Hu did not meet the criteria for mandatory relief under the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act.

The other innocent investors were not named in the judgment, but the court has a list.

Justice Wilkinson-Smith said Hua had filed an affidavit setting out funds which she says are legitimately owed to 14 separate debtors.

“The total amount is almost $1.5m,” the judge said.

“These debts, if released from restraint, would significantly diminish the property available for forfeiture while releasing Ye Hua and QDD from contractual obligations to the debtors.”

The Crown lawyer who prosecuted Hua, Sam McMullan, has said hers was a case without comparison in New Zealand history.

“By value, Ms Hua’s offending is many magnitudes more serious than any other case which has been before a court in this country,” McMullan said.

The charges against her alleged that she either knew the cash she was funnelling into bitcoin or foreign currency at Valent’s behest was dirty money, or she was at least reckless as to whether it was from the proceeds of crime.

Hua’s company handled vast amounts of money.

A separate Department of Internal Affairs prosecution of QDD said that in one eight-month period it had made nearly 800 large or complex transactions totalling $120.7m, and more than 1000 wire transfers with a total value of $94.7m.

That prosecution, in 2017, found that QDD had breached its obligations under anti-money laundering laws.

The company was fined $356,000.

Ric Stevens spent many years working for the former New Zealand Press Association news agency, including as a political reporter at Parliament, before holding senior positions at various daily newspapers. He joined NZME’s Open Justice team in 2022 and is based in Hawke’s Bay. His writing in the crime and justice sphere is informed by four years of front-line experience as a probation officer.