Roger Moroney: Trust people to find a loophole

Well that was money foolishly spent.
I wandered down to the newsagents late last week to pick up a copy of the National Business Review to see if they had released the annual rich list ... and they had.
But, oh dear, once again, my surname and initials were nowhere to be seen in that fine and illustrious list.
"This is an outrage," I cried as I sipped upon my first drink for the day (it had gone 11 ... I do have standards.)
The reaction from those beside me was just a whimsical sort of squawk.
Oh lucky budgies ... they need not concern themselves about the foibles of finance.
I immediately picked up the phone and called the phone banking line ... one of those 0800 things where a robot lady tells you how far your account is submerged in the mire ... the kak ... the poo. She is most pleasant though and always starts her response with the word "welcome".
Then she tells you what numbers to press on the phone to receive even more dreadful news, and adds that if everything is unbelievably bad you can always hit the hash key and she'll happily start reading out the whole thing again, just to underline that what you heard the first time was indeed the way it is.
Hearing the word "debit" was enough for me and I bid her farewell for the time being. I went back to scouring the National Business Review and read that the very baseline of this rich list is a paltry $50 million.
The prospect of winning Lotto every week for 50 weeks is not a strong one, so I leafed through the financial organ looking for the Poor List.
"I must be a contender for this," I snorted, to which one of the budgies replied "gwerk".
But there was no list reflecting the other end of the financial spectrum so I looked for the crossword ... but couldn't find that either so I mowed the lawns instead. It was as I let my aim slip and tore the plaster feet off Nobby the Gnome that an idea came to me.
You don't need your money to make the rich list ... you need someone else's.
On television the other night a lawyer fellow was defending his client stoutly over claims the well-attired chap had laundered millions of dollars from honest, decent and true folk, who had trusted him to look after their dosh, and make it work for them in their dotage years.
His client, the equally well-attired lawyer insisted, was effectively broke.
Barely had a dollar to live on.
Only later did it transpire that there was money in the whole equation, but it could not be touched ... for it had been placed in a family trust.
A family trust.
Watching this quite remarkable and insulting absurdity unfold I had to ask myself how anyone in this particular financial miscreant's family could possibly trust each other ... but there you go.
So, as the plaster dust from Nobby the Gnome's dismembered feet settled slowly over the choking budgies, I had an idea.
Family trusts huh?
Mmmm, borrow or source lots of money from lots of people who never heard the expression "if it seems too good to be true ..." and shove it all in a family trust which no one, but the family in the fine print, can touch.
It seemed like a wonderful idea, given the concept had obviously already successfully been used by several dodgy high-flyers who creamed honest money from good people to build their own nests of glamour and avarice.
But I needed advice.
I was going to call my lawyer to see if he could jack one up for me but foolishly realised he doesn't get out until 2014, so I looked up some websites.
Now, don't get me wrong, a family trust is a valuable and noble concept, and when administered with all good intentions is a fine thing.
But you know how it is.
Find a loophole ... find a back door ... find a legal way to lock up other people's dosh ... and someone will do it.
And they have, and it's disgusting.
It is high time, even low time, the financial lawmakers of this land closed off the back alleys into this family trust state of affairs which locks up good people's earnings in bad peoples' apparently "untouchable" accounts.
I don't aspire to be on the rich list any more, for I have the perfect family trust and I am very happy.
They trust me to lose money on the horses, buy cases of over-priced imported lager and mistakenly buy a bloody great turkey when we only needed a size 10 chook.
Roger Moroney is an award-winning journalist for Hawke's Bay Today and observer of the slightly off-centre.