Abstract:
In recent years numerous foreigners (including some Australians, a Malaysian playboy billionaire, a Maltese politician, and the manager of an English premier league football club) have set up trusts in New Zealand. This would appear to have enabled them to escape tax in their home country and perhaps also to conceal the proceeds of crime. In 2017 the government amended the law with a view to preventing such abuses, but what happened to the trusts already established and the hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of assets they held remains unclear.