When police raided one of Nga Thanh Phan's properties, they found a garage and all six rooms on the upper floor being used to grow cannabis. Photo / NZME
When police raided one of Nga Thanh Phan's properties, they found a garage and all six rooms on the upper floor being used to grow cannabis. Photo / NZME
Auckland woman Nga Thanh Phan was given 11 months of home detention on drug-related charges.
When police raided her rental properties, they found large-scale cannabis growing operations.
Phan has agreed to pay $300,000 in a proceeds-of-crime settlement with police.
Two other houses owned by her husband and another belonging to her brother were also searched and revealed to be “grow houses” for the cultivation of the drug.
When police started looking into Phan’s affairs, they discovered that she once owned a house in Australia that had been confiscated – because it too had been used for cannabis cultivation.
Now, Phan and her relatives have lost their New Zealand rental property portfolio after they defaulted on the mortgage repayments and the lenders sold them, leaving them with nothing in return.
Her previously clean New Zealand criminal record also records a conviction, and she has recently reached a deal with the police to surrender $300,000, to be confiscated as the proceeds of crime.
More than $44,500 of that money is already in the hands of the Official Assignee – a government official – after being seized from a safe in Phan’s home.
The one property still in her ownership is a home in Flat Bush, Auckland, where she resides. It was the only one where cannabis was not being grown.
If Phan cannot raise the rest of the $300,000 within six months, that house will also be sold to cover her debt.
The real estate enterprise run by Phan, her then-husband Khanh Truong Nguyen, and her brother Dung Anh Phan began to fall apart in 2020.
Fuller details have now been revealed in court documents related to the police civil case, which aimed to confiscate their property under the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act 2009.
The act deters crime by taking away from criminals the assets they have gained from their illegal activities.
Nga Thanh Phan appealed against her prison sentence to the High Court, which quashed it and replaced it with home detention.
The first property raided by police was at Whangaripo, just before Christmas 2020. Nguyen was the registered owner, having bought it eight months earlier.
He paid $760,000 for it, putting down a deposit of $153,500, roughly half of which he got in a transfer from a bank account in Nga Thanh Phan’s name.
The rest was covered by a mortgage from a trading bank.
When police looked into Nga Thanh Phan’s bank account, they noticed suspicious trading, with it having received $108,000 in deposits from “unidentified third parties” over a year.
Nguyen’s bank account, which he used to repay the mortgage, had received another $22,500 cash deposits and $4600 from unknown third parties.
Six more properties searched
In April 2021, police searched six other properties owned by the family, finding substantial cannabis operations at each of them.
One of them, in Flat Bush, was the second in Nguyen’s ownership.
Another at Papakura was owned by Phan’s brother, Dung Anh Phan.
In a property in Sandringham owned by Nga Thanh Phan, police found 72 mature cannabis plants and 50 smaller ones.
Plants were found in the garage and all six rooms on the upper level of the house.
One of the upstairs rooms had been converted into a “processing room” and contained a bucket of cannabis heads. The floor was covered in cut cannabis material.
At a Tuakau property, also owned by Nga Thanh Phan, police found more than 200 cannabis plants at various stages of growth, and 296g of cannabis drying on a plastic tray.
At a Takanini house, they found 231 plants between 23 and 160cm in height, and 34 seedlings.
At a Pukekohe property, they found another 177 plants and seedlings.
Nga Thanh Phan was not present at any of the properties when they were searched, and when her case came to the district court, Judge David McNaughton noted she claimed not to know about the cannabis operations being run in the properties, which she let out to tenants.
She also said that she had been “too busy” with her children’s medical needs to concentrate on managing her properties.
Guilty pleas to four charges
However, Judge McNaughton said these claims were inconsistent with her guilty pleas to four charges of permitting a premises to be used for cannabis cultivation, under the Misuse of Drugs Act.
Court documents also say that the cash deposits made into her bank accounts – more than $218,000 over three years – were not genuine rental payments.
Only one rental agreement she produced named a person for whom police or Immigration New Zealand held any record.
Judge McNaughton sentenced Phan to two years and nine months in prison, but this was reduced to 11 months of home detention in July 2023, after she appealed to the High Court.
Among matters raised by her lawyer in the High Court was Phan’s position of “extreme vulnerability” as a victim of alleged abuse, and her subservience to her now former husband in the context of their Vietnamese culture.
The High Court also said she should have received a bigger sentence discount for her children’s complex medical needs. A cultural report suggested they would need to go into care if Phan was sent to prison.
Under the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act 2009, police often take civil court action alongside criminal cases to confiscate assets gained by significant criminal activity.
They do this by first obtaining a restraining order, which prevents criminals from disposing of or hiding their assets, and then returning to the High Court to get a forfeiture order, often months later.
In Phan’s case, instead of a full forfeiture order, she and the police negotiated the $300,000 settlement to avoid “obvious risks” to Phan and the police if the matter went to a High Court hearing.
Phan’s brother and ex-husband were dealt with in separate hearings.
Nguyen reached an agreement with police under which he would hand over $202,932, and Dung Anh Phan was to pay $120,000.
Ric Stevens spent many years working for the former New Zealand Press Association news agency, including as a political reporter at Parliament, before holding senior positions at various daily newspapers. He joined NZME’s Open Justice team in 2022 and is based in Hawke’s Bay. His writing in the crime and justice sphere is informed by four years of frontline experience as a probation officer.
