A tiny New Zealand financial services firm processed millions of dollars in transfers for high-risk clients including a convicted U.S. fraudster, a Belarusian oligarch close to Aleksandr Lukashenko, and a British man later convicted in Europe’s “cum-ex” tax fraud, according to a new investigation by OCCRP and partnering media outlets. 

The firm, Worldclear Ltd., operated from the 10th floor of an office building in Hamilton with fewer than a dozen employees between 2014 and 2019 yet a leaked internal document from December 2017 states the company had grown to process around 500 million New Zealand dollars, or roughly $355 million, in payments per year, according to OCCRP. 

The investigative news organization, working with Interest.co.nz, Sweden’s Expressen, Lithuania’s 15min.lt, and the Belarusian Investigative Center, said it based its reporting on a leak of client lists, transaction records, and internal correspondence provided by former Worldclear employee Richard Whitham. The investigation found no evidence that Worldclear or its staff knowingly facilitated financial crimes, OCCRP said. Founder David Hillary, a New Zealand businessman and former financial adviser, denied any wrongdoing.

“Neither Worldclear nor I knowingly or recklessly facilitated criminal offending,” Hillary said in a statement quoted by OCCRP. He added that characterizing a client or transaction as high-risk did not imply that the firm had aided crime.

A confidential 2018 report by New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs, included in the leaked files, found that Worldclear lacked adequate controls for “monitoring, examining and keeping written findings relating to complex or large transactions, unusual patterns or strange transactions or any other activity that may be connected to money laundering or terrorist financing,” according to OCCRP.

The agency also found Worldclear’s customer due diligence to be “ad hoc” and concluded the firm had no functioning system to screen politically exposed persons, the report said. The department issued remedial instructions but did not refer the case to police. Its head of anti-money-laundering compliance, Serge Sablyak, told OCCRP that the statute of limitations for criminal non-compliance charges had now passed.

Among Worldclear’s clients was Michael Wilson, an American-Canadian who was under indictment for wire fraud when his company West Kingdom Holdings was onboarded in December 2015. Within weeks, Wilson transferred $1.5 million through a Worldclear account before fleeing Canada for Vietnam by private jet with his family and three dogs, according to the report. He was later arrested, returned to the United States, and sentenced in 2018 to 108 months in prison.

An FBI affidavit cited by OCCRP said the use of Worldclear as an intermediary had “aided in disguising the true source of the funds.”

The investigation also reported that Worldclear processed at least $2 million in 2017 on behalf of Guenther Klar, a British citizen convicted in Denmark in 2024 of defrauding Danish tax authorities of $45 million. The payments were routed through Cayman Islands-based Global Fidelity, itself a Worldclear client, and covered transfers to a U.A.E. company as well as hotels, flights, school fees, flowers, and designer shoes, according to court records cited by OCCRP. Klar is now in detention in Luxembourg awaiting trial.

Separately, both of Worldclear’s minority shareholders had convictions for financial crime either before or during their tenure. One, Swedish national Mikael Magnusson, was sentenced in Panama in 2017 to nine years in prison for money laundering and is the subject of a 2023 Interpol red notice, the consortium said. 

The other minority shareholder, Venezuelan national Arturo Jose Trujillo Villalobos, was convicted in 1999 of conspiracy to sell forged Venezuelan government bonds, OCCRP reported. He did not respond to requests for comment. Hillary said Trujillo had never been convicted of any financial crime “so far as I knew then and know now,” according to the report.