What does it take to get banned for life from running a business? Typically decades of business failure, dozens of criminal convictions, and wholesale disregard for the restrictions of bankruptcy. Matt Nippert dives into banning orders imposed by the Registrar of Companies over the past decade and finds 10 of
NZ’s top 10 banned business people: Fraud, bankruptcies, and lifetime bans
Subscribe to listen
Access to Herald Premium articles require a Premium subscription. Subscribe now to listen.
Already a subscriber? Sign in here
Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech.
Banning orders imposed by the Registrar of Companies reveal 10 of NZ's worst business people. Illustration / NZ Herald. Photo / 123rf
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.
Committing Companies Act offences relating to managing a company, or being convicted of a dishonesty offence such as fraud, also triggers an automatic five-year ban.
But sometimes the usual approach is not enough.
The Registrar of Companies is empowered to issue prohibition orders for up to 10 years on repeat offenders.
In extreme cases, the registrar can also make applications to the High Court for longer periods of restriction. This can include barring people from running or managing a business for life.
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.
These uplifted penalties have been granted five times over the past decade, with the first lifetime ban handed down in 2019 and a further two ultimate sanctions granted since.
A Herald search of Gazette filings has identified the recipients of the longest banning orders imposed over the past decade.
Most have extensive prior business failures or bankruptcies, and many have criminal convictions, for dishonesty offences or skirting bankruptcy restrictions, related to their management style.
All of the top 10 are male. The first woman – Kendall Twigden, the director of foreign-exchange trading software disaster Phoenix Forex – appears at 11th place with an 8.5-year ban imposed in 2017.
This is a ranked list of New Zealand’s top 10 longest-banned business people, as determined by the penalties imposed by the Registrar of Companies and the High Court.
1st= Lance Jack Ryan (lifetime ban)
Lance Jack Ryan earns first place on the list by virtue of being the first to attract the ultimate sanction: a lifetime ban.
Previously known as Lance Thompson, he has two prior bankruptcies and in 2005 was convicted of opening bank accounts in dead people’s names and applying for social welfare benefits.
About a decade ago he teamed up with David Blake to run the Hygiene Foundation, a faux industry standards organisation that attracted complaints from clients and employees.
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.
Ryan and Blake were prohibited from running a company at this point and in 2017 were convicted of breaching these restrictions.
Ryan reached his nadir with Arena Capital, pitched as a foreign-exchange trading firm but was in fact a Ponzi scheme.
A total of $8.4 million was raised from 900 investors, and a judge overseeing the Serious Fraud Office prosecution described the business as “an elaborate farce perpetrated on investors”.
In 2018, Ryan pleaded guilty to charges of fraud, false accounting and forgery and was sentenced to seven years and six months in prison.
In 2019, Justice Geoffrey Venning made case history in banning Ryan from running companies for life following an application from the Registrar of Companies.
“Mr Ryan has been guilty of persistent and ongoing dishonest behaviour involving the use of the company structures to obtain money from the public. His case is one of the most serious cases and is an appropriate case for a lifetime ban,” Venning said.
1st= Raymond Anthony Andrews (lifetime ban)
Raymond Andrews’ trail of business destruction runs back decades, with tax evasion convictions dating back to 2002. He was bankrupted in 2008 and has been undischarged since.
Bankruptcy restrictions were no barrier to new ventures, including a laser hair removal business the Official Assignee had refused permission for him to be engaged in.
He was convicted and imprisoned in 2013, 2017 and 2019. The latter offending occurred while he was on bail, with the judge in his case recording the Official Assignee believed his was the “most egregious occasion which they [were] aware of in relation to persons who have continued to trade while subject to orders of bankruptcy”.
In 2023, Justice Anne Hinton, hearing an application from the registrar to bar Andrews permanently, granted the order: “Mr Andrews has shown complete disregard for the law and for his bankruptcy. The financial losses have been significant. Mr Andrews is entirely unremorseful. I see no prospect of rehabilitation and a high prospect that he may engage in similar conduct if the door is open for him to do so.”
Andrews, now in his mid-70s, unsuccessfully represented himself at that hearing where he told the court he was studying law at AUT and hoped to one day be admitted to the bar.
1st= Michael Le Roy (lifetime ban)
The freshest name on this list, just last week the High Court at Christchurch imposed a lifetime ban on Christchurch junkman Michael Le Roy.
A hazard in the waste management sector, he was first bankrupted in 2010 when his company went under leaving 500 tonnes of rubbish abandoned on a lifestyle block.
He returned from bankruptcy purgatory to build a 400,000-tyre mountain in Christchurch with plans to process and recycle the pile of used rubber, but his trail of trash and debts again mounted.
In 2018, he was bankrupted again and the cost of dealing with a stash of old tyres was estimated to be $500,000.
Investigators found he continued to manage businesses despite the restrictions of insolvency, including using a family member to register another tyre-recycling business.
By 2020, he was facing a slew of court prosecutions, with Inland Revenue chasing him for tax evasion and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment accusing him of running a business while bankrupt. He was convicted of forgery, tax fraud and misleading the Official Assignee and sentenced to three years in prison.
Justice Raoul Neave told Le Roy at the time that: “Considerable havoc has been left in your wake.”
Le Roy was released on parole in September 2024.
4th Lawrence Alexander David Branson-Marsters (15 years)
He was born David Lawrence Monk, but went on to legally change his name three times. But by 2023, his past – with more than 100 convictions for dishonesty – caught up with him and he was imprisoned as Lawrence Alexander David Branson-Marsters.
His trail of hazardous business behaviour and fraud runs back decades. In 2001, he fled New Zealand after Inland Revenue began investigating his affairs, and it was three years of extradition proceedings and a deportation before he returned home to plead guilty to 48 charges of filing fraudulent GST returns and was imprisoned.
He kept racking up dishonesty convictions, and registering companies – using false names and addresses – despite being prohibited from doing so.
In 2015, he was again convicted of fraud, this time for convincing a neighbour to invest in one of his companies, and received a five-year prison sentence. The wheels at this point began turning to see his corporate straitjacket made near-permanent.
As well as prosecuting him for skirting bankruptcy restrictions, the registrar applied to the High Court in 2022 for an extended prohibition order and he was banned from directing or managing a company for a further 15 years.
The following year Judge Evangelos Thomas sentenced him to seven months in prison for his latest offending.
“There is a high public interest in protecting the market from you,” Thomas said.
5th David Blake (12 years)
Blake has clocked up three bankruptcies to date, with $720,290 in unpaid debts accrued, some under his previous legal name David Hughey. Each period of bankruptcy came with complaints that he continued to manage businesses during his statutory three-year ban.
By 2012 he was working with Lance Ryan in the Hygiene Foundation, where Blake used his business partner and wife as front people to try to skirt bankruptcy restrictions.
The registrar in 2019 sought orders to ban Blake and Ryan for life, but Justice Venning considered Ryan’s criminal fraud with the Arena Capital Ponzi scheme marked him as clearly a more serious risk than his one-time business partner and elected to bar Blake for only 12 years.
“Despite his protestations of ignorance, the pattern of behaviour was clear and deliberate,” Venning said.
6th Robert James Cottle (10 years)
Nelson man Robert Cottle, better known as Bob, had big international dreams. His first business venture attracting adverse attention claimed to have contracts with the Estonian Government to manufacture railway sleepers. It failed, and he was bankrupted in 2006.
Days after emerging from bankruptcy restrictions in 2009, he incorporated Infratech Mining, claiming to be in possession of valuable gold mining licences in Columbia and just being in need of a few tens of millions of capital to develop them. Subsequent court rulings determined the licences never existed, or if they did, they were not owned by Infratech.
Infratech never engaged in any actual resource extraction. It did, however, engage in a series of capital and loan-raising from local investors to pursue offshore loans that liquidators later determined were advance-fee frauds.
“Insofar as Infratech‘s creditors and investors were concerned, Mr Cottle was playing a form of Russian roulette with their money,” the registrar said of Infratech‘s business strategy of paying shareholder funds to scammers.
Infratech eventually went into liquidation, causing $3m in losses to investors, triggering the registrar to investigate and later ban him from future business enterprises.
The report underpinning a 10-year ban on Cottle – the longest prohibition yet handed out by the registrar when it was imposed in 2016 – indicated it was unclear exactly what motivated the man.
The deputy registrar said in his report: “Liquidators speculated whether Mr Cottle was a cunning or cynical conman or a credulous fool. I am inclined to the view that he was both.”
7th= David Dayanand Sharma (9 Years)
A real estate agent and property manager who went rogue, liquidators point to David Sharma’s previously profitable business paying loans for a family trust-owned property in 2016 as the moment matters began to curdle.
The taxman and his clients began to start being short-changed, with GST and PAYE payments missed, and bond payments siphoned off instead of being properly lodged. Two years later Sharma tipped the company into liquidation, but the registrar noted the rot had set in long before.
“The company was already one of the walking dead. Mr Sharma administered the coup de grace before the IRD could.”
But having appointed liquidators, Sharma then refused to co-operate with them. He provided unfulfilled promises that family interests would make creditors whole.
His companies were found to have accurate financial statements or accounting records, leaving liquidators having to reconstruct the sorry state of affairs and causing the registrar to employ nautical metaphors: “It is akin to a ship’s captain going into reef infested waters without a navigation chart.”
In handing down a nine-year banning order in 2019 the registrar concluded: “Mr Sharma has never acknowledged that what he did was wrong and not demonstrated any remorse. I consider that then, and now, Mr Sharma has no ethical compass. I consider Mr Sharma to be a menace, and a danger to the public.”
7th= Steven Wayne Morrow (9 years)
Steven Morrow is a repeat tax evader whose ban was based on concerns he would again go on to operate businesses that provide him personal benefit but leave creditors – mostly IRD in his case – hanging for millions.
In 2016, Morrow was sentenced to nearly three years in prison after pleading guilty to 40 charges of tax evasion.
Those charges concerned one company of three set up by Morrow that, according to liquidators and IRD, followed a pattern of failing to pay tax and shifting activity to a new entity as creditors started liquidation proceedings.
The registrar, in ordering him banned for nine years in 2016, said Morrow’s failings were not arcane: “This is not a failing on a technical level. This goes to the very basic failings of a person who overrides any sense of what is right to do what benefits him personally.”
His history also counted against him, the registrar noted: “Mr Morrow’s track record is a real issue. Mr Morrow got home detention in 2009 for stealing PAYE. Yet Mr Morrow did the same thing again on a massive scale, which was premeditated and repeated.”
Morrow’s ban expires at the end of this year.
7th= John Edward Clancy (9 Years)
Developer John Clancy was the man behind Global Homes, a cluster of companies that collapsed in 2015 leading to total losses to creditors of $4.3m, including $1.4m owed to IRD.
The taxman narrowed in on one part of Global Homes, and successfully prosecuted Clancy for 12 counts of tax evasion and in 2017, he was sentenced to 14 months in prison.
The registrar, in a 2018 report prepared to impose a nine-year ban on Clancy from directing or managing companies, said in relation to Global Homes: “He effectively used the companies as his personal playthings.”
After being released from prison, Clancy was for a time employed at tiny home developer Cosy Homes.
That relationship, however, quickly soured and his employers in 2022 secured a ruling from the Employment Relations Authority that he had misused company information to set up rival company Living Little and ordered Clancy to pay $24,000.
7th Richard Zongyan Lee (9 years)
Richard Zongyan Lee first hit the headlines in early 2011 when his Starplus Homes – a major developer in Auckland and the Waikato – began attracting complaints from buyers of shoddy workmanship and from subcontractors of unpaid invoices.
By April 2013 the gig was up and liquidators were appointed, who found Starplus had managed to accrue $34m in unsecured creditors off the back of only $1000 in shareholder capital.
An investigation later found that in the lead-up to liquidation, Lee had hived off properties and assets into another entity he controlled, or to certain creditors to settle in preference to his vast other debts.
A report prepared by the registrar in 2015 to ban him from managing or directing a company for nine years said Lee had “no concept of governance or the duties of a director” and had abused limited liability structures to ignore creditors.
“If a person is to be a director he or she must have good personal ethics and must be able to be trusted. Mr Lee is lacking in both characteristics. The business world needs protection from Mr Lee,” the registrar concluded.
Lee’s ban, imposed almost a decade ago, expired in May last year.
– Additional reporting by Chris Knox
Matt Nippert is an Auckland-based investigations reporter covering white-collar and transnational crimes and the intersection of politics and business. He has won more than a dozen awards for his journalism – including twice being named Reporter of the Year – and joined the Herald in 2014 after having spent the decade prior reporting from business newspapers and national magazines.
