New Zealand: the Shell Company Incorporation Franchises (IV) (and Latvia)
This is the latest post in our GT Group follow up series. In previous posts, we surveyed the ruins of the GT Group empire (here), and suggested that other dubious company agents were also part of it, here, here and here.
Picking over the rubble of GT Group’s operations in New Zealand, with tie-ups to other offshore incorporation outfits still in mind, one turns over a stone in the document audit trail at Vincent International Limited, and discovers the strikingly named Inga SLAVSKA of TROPIC ALLIANCE LIMITED. One wonders who she is, where she’s from, and what she’s doing.
Tropic Alliance and the Taylors are linked again via companies at the address Plaza Level 41-117 Shortland Street, Auckland. Those companies are all directed by the high profile stooge who cropped up in the first wave of the GT Group scandal, Stella Port-Louis:
…GT Group was linked to the biggest money-laundering operation in US history.Watch out for the name Tormex Ltd, which will show up again later in this post.
Wachovia Bank – now a subsidiary of the global financial giant Wells Fargo – was fined $US160 million for helping to disguise the illegal origins of up to $US378 billion for Mexican drug lords.
The penalty was the result of a long US Drug Enforcement Administration investigation that uncovered multimillion-dollar transfers from Mexican currency exchange houses to the Wachovia sub-branch in Miami – money that was used to buy planes for cocaine shipments. Much of the money originated from the Sinaloa cartel, the fiercest protagonists in the Mexican drug war in which more than 28,000 people have been killed since 2007.
Last year police intelligence sources told Fairfax newspapers and the ABC’s 7.30 Report that about half the cocaine now entering Australia was being sent from Mexico, and that the Sinaloa cartel was behind many of the shipments.
During the court proceedings it was alleged that four New Zealand firms registered by the GT Group – Keronol Ltd, Melide Ltd, Tormex Ltd, and Dorio (NZ) Ltd – helped launder about $40 million of the proceeds using Latvian bank accounts and Wachovia’s London branch.
The US investigation provided a suggestion that the Taylor name was linked to an infinitely wider and more complex global network.
The sole director of each of the NZ firms was Stella Port-Louis, who has an address in the Seychelles. She appears as the director of more than 300 other New Zealand companies, many of them registered by one of the Taylors at Queen Street in Auckland.
In 2007, Port-Louis was singled out by US President Barack Obama – then a senator – for the way she headed up at least 100 companies in the US state of Wyoming when he warned of ”serious problems confronting law enforcement as a result of minimal company ownership information requirements”.
Back to Tropic Alliance, which, we now think, might be part of that “infinitely wider and more complex global network”. It also shows up in recent, mostly still live incorporations at 7 Rose Road, Ponsonby, also sometimes spelled “Ponsoby” by some careless typist. Amongst those incorporations is Tropic Alliance itself, directed by the striking Inga Slavska, from Riga, Latvia. We recall the Latvian connection, in the above quoted piece.
So we don’t quite know who the striking Ms Slavska is really working for, yet, but we do now have an idea where she is. The address given as a residence looks as if it might be serviced offices, so it’s only a rough idea.
At this point, the doughty investigative journalist might brush off his Latvian and hit the streets. This blogger has neither the budget nor the energy. Besides, there’s always Google and LinkedIn.
Et voila: there is an Inga Slavska in Latvia , with a Swiss connection, apparently....MORE
