It has since had a long and complex history in the New Zealand courts.
All the main players have had their names suppressed. They are a formerly married couple, named in court documents as Ms A and Mr B, and the alleged fraudster is named as Ms C.
Ms A and Mr B have now divorced, leaving Mr B to fight his court battles alone. But Ms A was originally a party to proceedings filed in the High Court at Auckland, alleging that Ms C had defrauded the couple out of approximately $500,000.
They claimed that Ms C deceived them into investing the money in a Chinese company, believing it would be transferred to a New Zealand company associated with Ms C and then paid out to the couple in support of their application to migrate to New Zealand.
The New Zealand funds were supposed to help them meet the criteria for entrepreneurs’ work visas.
This never happened. The money was lost when Ms C’s companies collapsed.
Ms C was arrested in China on “illegal fundraising” charges and subsequently went to prison – although the couple did not know this at the time and thought she had just “disappeared”.
But the couple knew that Ms C owned a house in Auckland because they had stayed there when they returned for another visit in 2015.
In 2018, they applied to the Auckland High Court trying to get their money back through a claim against Ms C’s New Zealand asset – the house.
The court found in their favour, placed a “freeze” over the house and asked the couple to make representations about how much they might be owed in damages.
Judge Gerard van Bohemen said that New Zealand law applied in this case because Ms C’s representations about the investment deal were made here, and the consequences for Ms A and Mr B were felt in this country.
The court was told that a misleading prospectus about the investment was handed to the couple at the Auckland house.
Ms C did not take part in those proceedings – she was still in prison and did not know about them.
When she found out she had been sued in New Zealand, she hired a lawyer to protest that the New Zealand courts did not have jurisdiction to hear the case.
New evidence was submitted that, contrary to what had been argued before, there had been no meeting in New Zealand where Ms C had made direct representations to Ms A and Mr B.
After claims and counter-claims which took the case up to the Court of Appeal and back to the High Court, Ms C’s protest about jurisdiction was upheld.
“An important factor in this decision was the High Court judge’s view that the central issue, whether the alleged misrepresentations had been made in New Zealand, could be determined only following cross-examination of Ms C, which could not occur because Ms C was detained in a Chinese prison,” according to a Supreme Court judgment issued this week.
“The judge also considered most aspects of the dispute (excluding the misrepresentations) took place in China and that there was a better prospect of calling relevant witnesses in China.”
Mr B – by this time going it alone following the divorce from his wife – again tried to get the Court of Appeal to look at his case, with mainly technical arguments including that an appeal would be time-barred in China and questioning whether Ms C’s solicitors really had the authority to act for her.
He was unsuccessful in the Court of Appeal and in a subsequent appeal to the Supreme Court, which has now decided that none of his arguments met the criteria to be heard at that level.
The Court also declined his request for an order that Ms C pay him the costs awarded to him and his ex-wife by the Court of Appeal in 2020.
“This court does not have any involvement in costs awards by the Court of Appeal,” the Supreme Court judgment said.
