High-profile Auckland lawyer David Johnstone appointed High Court judge

Well-known Auckland lawyer David Johnstone (left) has been made a High Court judge. Photo / File

Well-known Auckland barrister David Johnstone has been appointed a judge of the High Court, Attorney-General David Parker announced today.

Johnstone is best known for his work as a solicitor with the Auckland Crown Solicitor’s firm, Meredith Connell.

Highly respected in the Auckland legal sector, Johnstone in recent years has largely focused on criminal prosecutions and appeals at all levels in the criminal justice arena, with a particular speciality in cases involving organised crime, corruption, serious fraud and national security.

He graduated from the University of Auckland in 1991 with a BCom/LLB(Hons), and joined Bell Gully as a solicitor, practising in general commercial litigation.

During 1993 and 1994, he undertook study at the University of Cambridge, graduating with an LLM(Hons) in 1994. He left Bell Gully in 1996.

In 1998, Justice Johnstone then took up a role at Meredith Connell, conducting District Court and then High Court jury trials and regulatory prosecutions, and civil proceedings under the Proceeds of Crime Act 1991.

He became a partner at Meredith Connell in 2005 and had been a member of the Serious Fraud Office’s prosecutors’ panel since 2014.

Earlier this year, Johnstone left Meredith Connell to join the independent bar.

Johnstone has been involved in a number of high-profile cases, including the Desert Road murder case after the disappearance of Bao Chang “Ricky” Wang and the Labour Party ‘summer camp’ sexual assault trial in 2019.

He also acted in the first case in New Zealand seeking pecuniary penalties for breaches of the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act. Auckland firm Jiaxin Finance and its mother-and-son operators were handed millions of dollars in court-ordered fines after failing to report $53.4 million of suspicious transactions from international mogul Edward Gong, who was accused of running a pyramid scheme.

And Johnstone appeared in the FMA prosecution against Paul Bublitz, Bruce McKay and Richard Blackwood in 2019, for their crimes committed during the global financial crisis after the collapse of two finance companies which left investors short $17 million.

Johnstone will take up his High Court appointment on February 22 next year, sitting in Auckland.