Ken Whitney, John Key’s long time lawyer, has strong links to disgraced tax haven firm Mossack Fonseca. And, crucially, so did most of the people in the room when the then Revenue Minister Todd McClay folded on the potential moves to moderate New Zealand’s foreign trust industry.
Radio NZ and TVOne News have this morning revealed that four of the five companies represented in the meeting in which McClay dropped plans to regulate the industry had clear links to Mossack Fonseca at the time. The other firm was Antipodes Trust Group, Whitney’s own firm.
Key has previously said that Whitney had no links to Mossack Fonseca. But it turns out Whitney was a director of the Rothschild Trust (NZ) Limited, which owned and was the sole director of Capewood Investments, a company registered in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) that had Mossack Fonseca as its agent.
Whitney also acted as a referee for another Mossack Fonseca related firm, Cone Marshall, helping them build their shadowy business. According to John Key, Whitney is operating at “the highest ethical level and he is of the highest oversight, he happens to be brilliant.“.
So it appears that either the man who was the Prime Ministers closest legal confident and who handled the moving of his money around the world has lied to Key. Or, well… someone’s lying, for sure.
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