A leak from inside a small Hamilton financial services firm has revealed how Worldclear Ltd shifted hundreds of millions of dollars for clients including a convicted American fraudster, a British tax cheat sentenced over a $45 million Danish fraud, and a Belarusian oligarch close to Aleksandr Lukashenko, according to an investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and interest.co.nz.
Worldclear was founded in 2014 by New Zealand businessman and former financial adviser David Hillary, operating out of the tenth floor of an office block in Hamilton with fewer than a dozen staff. By December 2017 the firm was processing about NZ$500 million in payments a year through accounts it held at banks in New Zealand, the United States and Europe. The Department of Internal Affairs removed it from the financial service providers register in February 2019, after Worldclear told regulators it had stopped trading.
The leaked cache came from Richard Whitham, a former Worldclear employee who fell out with Hillary after being accused of misappropriating client funds. Whitham pleaded guilty in 2021 to removing more than $1 million from a Singapore-based entity and served 38 months in prison. He told the investigation he had been “naive and stupid”.
Marketing material recovered from the files shows Worldclear deliberately courted customers who could no longer get accounts at conventional banks. A draft document read “Correspondent banking problems?? USD payment problems?? Accounts closed??…We may be able to help.” Hillary said the firm catered to “clients who normal banks won’t have”, typically because of “their location in the world or their business structure”.
The customer book included Michael Wilson, an American-Canadian wire fraud fugitive who transferred $1.5 million through a Worldclear account held in the name of West Kingdom Holdings in 2015 and was later sentenced to 108 months in jail. British citizen Guenther Klar processed at least $2 million through Worldclear in 2017 and was convicted in Denmark in 2024 over a $45 million tax fraud. Another client, Andrew Strempler, had already been convicted in 2013 of conspiring to commit mail fraud in connection with illegal prescription drug sales. Offshore lenders, including Cayman Islands-based Global Fidelity Bank and Puerto Rico’s Euro Pacific Bank, also held Worldclear accounts.
The composition of the shareholder register raised its own red flags. Swedish national Mikael Magnusson, who developed the EBANQ software platform Worldclear ran on, took a minority stake through EBANQ Holdings B.V. in 2015. He is subject to a 2023 Interpol red notice over an unserved Panamanian money laundering sentence. Venezuelan Arturo Jose Trujillo Villalobos, who held a stake between 2017 and 2022, was convicted in 1999 of conspiracy to sell forged Venezuelan government bonds.
A March 2018 inspection by the Department of Internal Affairs found Worldclear was only partially compliant with the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act 2009. Inspectors said the company “did not have adequate controls for monitoring, examining and keeping written findings relating to complex or large transactions, unusual patterns or strange transactions…that may be connected to money laundering or terrorist financing”. Customer due diligence was described as “ad hoc”, politically exposed persons checks were not functioning, and staff manually tracked client funds in Excel spreadsheets. The DIA gave the firm nine months to comply, but supervision ended when Worldclear claimed it had wound down operations.
Hillary told the investigation the findings were “false” and “damaging”, and accused the DIA of having “ambushed Worldclear with a post-visit report”. Anti-money laundering specialist Martin Dilly told reporters that the inspectors’ findings pointed to “non-compliance which potentially meets the threshold for criminal penalties” and should have been referred to police. New Zealand barrister Fiona Hall said “somehow Worldclear got away scot-free”.
Outside experts said Worldclear’s structure reflected a familiar pattern in financial-crime circles. Ray Blake of The Dark Money Files told investigators that “complexity is the friend of people with something to hide”. Aaron Arnold of the Royal United Services Institute in London said using a New Zealand financial services provider would “reduce the likelihood of transactions being held up by banks” and “lower the regulatory temperature”, because New Zealand carries a reputation for clean financial regulation that international compliance teams tend to trust.
The trail did not end with deregistration. In May 2025 Hillary registered a new entity called Trusfinco Baninvest, with Trujillo listed as a director. Its website described the firm as a financial services provider, although no such registration was ever recorded. Magnusson, meanwhile, continues to develop the EBANQ software, which as of December 2025 was being marketed with new Banking-as-a-Service modules to other operators around the world.
The Worldclear Files investigation was a collaboration between OCCRP, Lithuanian outlet 15min.lt, the Belarusian Investigative Center, Sweden’s Expressen and interest.co.nz, funded by the Brian Gaynor Business Journalism Initiative. The story raises uncomfortable questions about how a small Hamilton outfit was able to operate at the edges of the global banking system for the best part of five years, processing hundreds of millions of dollars for clients that more conventional banks had already shown the door, and whether the regulatory net around New Zealand-registered financial service providers is still wide enough to catch the next one.
Do you think New Zealand’s clean financial reputation makes us an easy back door for high-risk international operators, or is the response from the DIA and FMA already tight enough? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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