Serious Fraud Office<\/a> said.<\/p>\nThe charges Hanyu was found guilty of related to more than $6.5m of new investments in the Group Term Deposit product, and more than $12.5m of reinvestments. <\/p>\n
Hanyu was also found guilty of using $1m that should have been invested in the Restaurant Fund, a different investment scheme offered by the company, but instead was used to repay one of the Waterloo Fund investors.<\/p>\n
Finally, Hanyu was found guilty of three representative charges of theft. <\/p>\n
Two of these were for transferring approximately $430,000 from East Wind\u2019s company accounts to her personal credit card. <\/p>\n
The remaining charge related to more than $400,000 that she arranged to be paid into an account associated with her to repay her mortgage.<\/p>\n
Hanyu worked together with Ashikaga to obtain funds from investors, making false statements about their financial products and promised returns.<\/p>\n
In reality there were no legitimate investments. The incoming funds were being used to make repayments to other investors.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was an incredibly complex case involving the analysis of substantial detailed financial records, many of which were in Japanese, and a large number of mostly overseas-based investors,\u201d SFO director Karen Chang said.<\/p>\n
![\"SFO]()
SFO director Karen Chang said it was an ‘incredibly complex’ case. Photo \/ Supplied<\/p>\n
\u201cThe decisive jury verdicts reflect the quality of the investigation and the strength of the Crown case,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cMs Hanyu and Mr Ashikaga exploited their connections to the Japanese community to deceive investors out of millions of dollars. Many of the investors did not get their money back.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hanyu will be sentenced on July 3.<\/p>\n
Creditors owed more than $43m<\/p>\n
In their final report, liquidators Stephanie Jeffreys and Malcom Moore of Grant Thornton said six East Wind companies owed a total of 171 creditors $43.3m.<\/p>\n
Two of the smaller entities \u2013 owing 10 creditors less than $20,000 \u2013 paid out between 69 and 83 cents in the dollar.<\/p>\n
But it was bad news for the remaining vast majority of creditors who account for more than 99% of the outstanding total, the report said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are insufficient funds to distribute to unsecured creditors of any of the other companies,\u201d the report said.<\/p>\n
A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent scam in which investors are paid out of money contributed by newer investors, and not from legitimate returns. It is named after Charles Ponzi, who ran an early such scheme in the United States in the 1920s.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Open Justice team in 2022 and is based in Hawke\u2019s Bay. His writing in the crime and justice sphere is informed by four years of frontline experience as a probation officer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Yuko Hanyu was the manager of the company\u2019s finance department from 2004 to December 2017. Jury finds multiple…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":378163,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[1558,138,1873,42503,3806,246,196973,2740,1874,3368,196961,24176,78,321,93,1132,2510,111,139,69,114111,38988,3170,61,5977,10000,196960],"class_list":{"0":"post-378162","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-been","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-charges","11":"tag-collapsed","12":"tag-east","13":"tag-finance","14":"tag-fleeced","15":"tag-former","16":"tag-found","17":"tag-guilty","18":"tag-hanyu","19":"tag-hundreds","20":"tag-in","21":"tag-investors","22":"tag-manager","23":"tag-million","24":"tag-multiple","25":"tag-new-zealand","26":"tag-newzealand","27":"tag-nz","28":"tag-ponzi","29":"tag-relation","30":"tag-scheme","31":"tag-to","32":"tag-which","33":"tag-wind","34":"tag-yuko"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378162\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/378163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}