Dragon King: the accountant who gave $7.8m in drug money a day job

“You better start pulling your weight or I’ll kick your f******* head in.”

That’s not how clients normally talk to their accountant, Crown prosecutor Sam McMullan drily noted.

And so it was that name suppression was lifted on Khieng Chiv, known as Kevin, 46, arrested more than two and a half years earlier in Operation Scuba. In July, Judge Debra Bell sentenced him to 10 years and 10 months.

This is the story of how he got here.

Enter the Dragon King

Chiv said it was all perfectly innocent. The millions moving through his construction companies were legitimate income. He did not know his clients were gang members. Any suggestion that he was laundering money for the Comancheros was wrong.

Unfortunately for Chiv, he had discussed the arrangement on Signal. His username was “Dragon King”.

The messages covered trusted contacts in Hong Kong, $3 million sitting in Dubai and another $5 million needed in Mexico to pay for drugs. When senior Comanchero Lihai Vimahi worried that Chiv’s contacts might be police, Chiv reassured him. The cash would be spent on construction wages. The money would bypass the banking system. There would be no trace.

This was not standard client-accountant correspondence either.

Clean money, dirty wages

The scheme was clever because the construction work was real. A construction firm needed labour and hired a subcontractor. Workers arrived. The job was done. The invoice was paid from one company account into another. So far, so ordinary.

What happened next was the trick. The subcontractor moved the invoice payment through shell companies to the criminal group. The workers were paid separately with cash from drugs, prostitution and other crime.

The criminals had swapped a pile of dirty banknotes for clean money already inside the banking system. No cash deposit. No suspicious queue at a bank. No smurfing small amounts across branches. Just wages.

It also made commercial sense for anyone willing not to look too closely. A legitimate labour-hire firm had to cover PAYE, ACC, holiday pay, insurance and supervision. An illegal operator paying $24 an hour in cash could comfortably undercut one charging around $50.

Police spoke to 25 construction companies likely to be named in court. Twelve agreed to meet. They described a sector already operating on thin margins, with legitimate labour firms losing work to contractors charging about 20% less. Everyone could see the price. Nobody could see the cash underneath it.

Police say $71 million moved through the wider cash-wage scheme uncovered by Operation Scuba. Around $33 million went offshore to pay for drugs. Chiv was convicted of laundering nearly $7.8 million of it.

A six-month-old construction success story

In March 2023, Chiv incorporated a company in the name of Viliami Havea, a Comancheros associate. Over the next six months, more than $3 million arrived in its bank account across 76 transactions.

A remarkable start for a new construction business. Less remarkable was where the money came from: shell companies based overseas.

Havea was real. The company was properly incorporated. The account was in its name. An identity check would have confirmed all three. It would not have explained the $3 million.

Playing house

Havea next appeared to buy a $3.8 million mansion in Half Moon Bay. He paid a $250,000 deposit. Nearly $1.8 million went into his lawyer’s trust account. A mortgage covered the balance.

There was one difficulty. Havea did not earn enough to support the loan. Chiv fixed that.

He prepared false tax returns showing Havea earning more than $700,000 a year. They helped secure part of the $2.8 million in bank loans Chiv fraudulently obtained to buy two properties for the gang.

The title and mortgage were registered in Havea’s name, but he never lived there. Comancheros national president Pasilika Naufahu’s wife and family moved in instead. One person owned the house on paper. Another enjoyed the view.

A bar, a café and $1.8 million in crypto

The mansion was one part of the portfolio. Chiv put $1.8 million into cryptocurrency. Another $1.8 million bought Coast Bar and the neighbouring Oliver’s Café on Ōrewa’s main street.

Construction explained the wages. Hospitality explained the cash. Cryptocurrency helped move the value elsewhere.

Shortly before Operation Scuba ended in March 2024, Havea sold the hospitality businesses to new owners, including Chiv. Both have since closed. Both went into liquidation in 2026 owing hundreds of thousands of dollars to Inland Revenue, staff and suppliers.

By then, the owners had larger problems. Vimahi admitted participating in an organised criminal group, obtaining by deception, supplying methamphetamine and six counts of money laundering. He received 12 years in prison.

Naufahu admitted participating in an organised criminal group and three counts of money laundering. He received a further eight. Chiv continued to insist he knew nothing. The jury disagreed.

An accountant with form

This was not Chiv’s first encounter with professional discipline. He was suspended as a chartered accountant in 2019 for two years following misconduct. The suspension did not prevent him from continuing to undertake general accounting work.

That same year, he was censured for multiple breaches of the immigration advisers’ code of conduct and stripped of his licence. Both matters were public before the companies at the centre of Operation Scuba were incorporated.

That history matters because Chiv’s professional standing and misconduct was part of what made him useful. The Comancheros did not need another person who knew how to sell drugs. They needed someone who was willing to work for them and understood companies, accounts, mortgages and the reassuring effect of a tax return prepared by an accountant. 

The jury found him guilty of participating in an organised criminal group, false accounting, using an altered document, obtaining by deception and 20 counts of money laundering. Judge Bell called him the architect of the scheme.

The previous professional

Judge Bell compared Chiv’s conduct with two earlier cases. In 2023, Ye “Cathay” Hua received six years for laundering at least $18 million for a drug syndicate. Despite the larger sum, Judge Bell considered Hua’s conduct less serious. His operation was comparatively crude and reckless. Chiv had deliberately designed structures to disguise the money.

The closer comparison was Auckland lawyer Andrew Neill Simpson. Millions in cash had been deposited into Simpson’s trust account. He also established trusts for Naufahu and other senior Comancheros, which were used to buy luxury cars and property. Simpson received two years and nine months in prison in 2020.

Chiv’s offending was more serious in its value, duration, sophistication and intent. But the two cases bookend the professional chain neatly. An accountant built the structure. A lawyer’s trust account could move the money. Companies, trusts, mortgages and property did the rest.

The paperwork had an alibi

The unsettling part of Operation Scuba is how much of the file was true. The companies existed. The directors were real. Workers turned up. Construction work was completed. Invoices were paid. A mortgage was registered. The hospitality businesses opened their doors. Only some of the documents needed to be false.

That is why verifying the company and its director would not have been enough. The identities were not necessarily the fiction. The fiction was what the activity meant.

An invoice showed that a construction company paid for labour. It did not show how the workers themselves were paid. A company registration showed that Havea was the director. It did not explain why his six-month-old business had received $3 million from offshore shell companies.

The documents agreed with one another because Chiv had made sure they did.

The red flags were in the gaps

None of these facts proves money laundering by itself. Together, they tell a different story:

• A newly incorporated construction company receiving millions within months.
• Dozens of payments from offshore companies with no obvious connection to its work.
• Labour supplied well below the cost expected of a compliant operator.
• Wage payments that do not support the workforce behind the invoices.
• Income evidence supplied through the same adviser arranging the structure.
• A buyer whose apparent income and assets emerge shortly before a major purchase.
• Money moving from construction into property, hospitality and cryptocurrency.
• The source-of-funds story may explain how the immediate payment reached the account. It may even come with documents. The harder question is whether the underlying activity explains the money at all.

What Operation Scuba exposes

Money laundering is often described as the movement of money. Chiv’s contribution was more valuable than that. He gave the money a biography.

Drug cash became construction wages. Shell-company payments became business revenue. A gang associate became a high-earning company director. A mansion became an ordinary residential purchase. Each step had a name, an account and a document attached.

That was the point. The scheme did not need to invent every transaction. It only needed to change what the real ones meant.

The Comancheros supplied the cash. The Dragon King supplied the story.