When his new tourism business went under because of Covid-19 travel restrictions, Auckland resident Syed Ibrahim sold the company’s recently purchased $90,000 bus and decided to pivot to coconut importation.
At least that was his cover story.
In reality, the 58-year-old businessman was dumping thousands of kilograms of unused coconut at a West Auckland landfill while keeping an “unprecedented” quantity of illegal methamphetamine ingredient pseudoephedrine.
The drug was then sold to a local Chinese drug syndicate headed by a man who went by the nickname “Turbo”.
Details of the 18-month scheme, thought to be the largest importation of pseudoephedrine ever prosecuted, can now be reported after the Herald obtained Judge Kirsten Lummis’ sentencing notes from Ibrahim’s hearing at Auckland District Court this year.
Ibrahim’s estimated haul of the drug was found by the court to have exceeded 1.5 tonnes – enough, the judge said, for a competent meth cook to manufacture up to 780kg of methamphetamine.
That amount of methamphetamine would roughly have a street value of between $140 million and $200m, according to a similar case cited by the judge.
Judge Lummis ordered Ibrahim to serve cumulative sentences totalling just under 15 years’ imprisonment, noting with what appeared to be frustration that Parliament last year downgraded the maximum sentence for a single charge from 14 years’ imprisonment to eight years.
“The overwhelming belief of those speaking [in Parliament in favour of the sentence reduction] appears to have been that, due to the rise in the large importations of [pre-manufactured] methamphetamine, importing pseudoephedrine for illicit purposes had largely fallen by the wayside,” she said.
“This case would suggest otherwise.”
When police searched Ibrahim’s home at the end of their operation in December 2022, they found $82,899 and multiple receipts for cash payments.
In a lengthy interview with police that followed, Ibrahim said he had been following instructions from a person in India also known as Ibrahim.
During an interview years later with a pre-sentence report writer, the defendant suggested he was a victim himself of a drug scam, not fully aware he had been aiding illegal pseudoephedrine supply and importation. He blamed his own naivety and trusting nature.
He also suggested that, once he started to suspect what was going on, he felt compelled to continue because of fear for his extended family’s safety overseas.
Judge Lummis, however, was not convinced.
“It is fair to say I found your evidence generally lacking in credibility,” she said of his attempts to explain away his conduct – some of which were shared under oath at a disputed facts hearing after his guilty pleas.
“It ... struck me as particularly implausible that you have never heard about drug importations, methamphetamine and pseudoephedrine despite living in New Zealand for some 25 years,” she said. “I also found it implausible that you suggested there was no personal reward for the importation and that you somehow siloed the money received and did not use it for your own personal use.
“It is clear you received significant quantities of cash and devoted a significant amount of time and labour to this operation.”
She outlined in detail 16 large coconut importations, half of which “contained huge quantities” of the meth ingredient.
His company, dubbed Harris New Zealand Tours and Travels, appears to have started out as a legitimate business in January 2020.
But “times were clearly tough” with the obliteration of the tourism sector because of Covid-19 and by June 2021 he had been granted approval to turn the same business into an importer, the judge noted.
The first shipment of coconut arrived that same month and it didn’t include pseudoephedrine, but the judge described that as “somewhat consistent with a pattern that developed of smaller importations being used as a dummy run for larger importations to follow”.
A week later, the next shipment, including more than 2500kg of desiccated coconut, arrived and was taken to a storage unit in New Lynn rented by Ibrahim.
“You were then able to isolate the pseudoephedrine from the coconut,” Judge Lummis said. “The storage unit contained scales enabling you to repackage and weigh the pseudoephedrine into the required amounts.
“On July 23 and July 31, 2021, you completed dead drops of bags of pseudoephedrine into the boots of unoccupied vehicles at the carpark of the Caltex on Dominion Rd.”
The imports that followed regularly included about 150-250kg of the illegal drug at a time. The final import appears to have been by far the largest haul of pseudoephedrine: 431kg.
Over the course of the 18 months, Ibrahim had spent $540,000 importing the coconuts into New Zealand. Records from the Waitākere refuse station show he then dumped about 15,000kg of the product.
When investigators first showed Ibrahim CCTV footage they had obtained from the storage facility, he initially insisted the repackaged material was coconut.
“You then claimed it was sand used in building,” the judge said. “You had no sensible explanation as to why so many thousands of kilograms of coconut were being dumped.
“You later acknowledged the product was chemicals but said you did not know what it was. You denied supplying the chemicals to others, claiming you had been instructed to dump all of it by your supplier.”
In total, Ibrahim faced eight charges involving the importation, possession and supply of pseudoephedrine.
It’s not the first time the court has been frustrated with the limitations of an eight-year sentence. The judge cited a precedent-setting Court of Appeal decision from 2006 in which the sentences for another pseudoephedrine smuggler were eventually stacked to more accurately reflect the totality of the offending.
At that time, pseudoephedrine was considered a Class C drug punishable by eight years’ imprisonment, similar to cannabis. The drug was later "reclassified in response to the huge amount of harm and destruction from methamphetamine and the large black market operating to obtain pseudoephedrine for manufacturing methamphetamine”, Judge Lummis noted in her decision.
“There had been an increase in criminal offending by people seeking to get their hands on pseudoephedrine either by importation or burglaries or pill shopping,” she said.
But it was believed by lawmakers more recently that the floor had dropped out of the black market demand for pseudoephedrine based on the “steady flow of cheaply obtained methamphetamine being imported into New Zealand in recent times”.
The most recent law change has been touted by Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour as paving the way for more effective cold and flu medications to return to chemist shelves.
The 2006 case involved just under 37kg of pseudoephedrine involving more than 200,000 illegally imported Contac NT cold capsules.
“By any stretch of the imagination, these are huge quantities,” the Court of Appeal wrote at the time of its decision to allow the sentences for each separate import to be stacked, explaining that the case “quite frankly makes the parliamentary-imposed maximum of eight years look inadequate”.
Judge Lummis said the “huge quantities” referred to in the 2006 decision was “almost laughable” in comparison to the amounts now regularly dealt with by the courts. Ibrahim’s importation of more than 1500kg was 42 times larger.
“This reflects the general and somewhat scary trend that the quantities of drugs coming through our borders just keep getting larger and larger,” Judge Lummis said.
“As far as I am aware, this [Ibrahim case] is the largest quantity of pseudoephedrine that the courts have had to consider.”
With the ability to stack the charges, Ibrahim could have theoretically faced up to 64 years’ imprisonment.
Defence lawyer Issac Koya argued his client’s participation in the scheme could be seen as fitting under the “lesser” category, which calls for defendants to receive sentences far below the maximum. But to agree with that assessment, the judge needed to find Ibrahim’s testimony credible.
She instead agreed with Crown prosecutor Ryan Benic that Ibrahim “played a critical role” in exchange for a significant benefit.
“In terms of the evidence that you gave at the disputed fact hearing, it appeared to me to jump around a lot and not provide a consistent, coherent narrative of events,” the judge said. “It appeared inherently implausible, particularly in regard to the objective evidence of the money in your bank accounts and the cash located at your address.
“There was simply no corroborative evidence to support anything in your narrative on key issues.
“Your evidence that you were not suspicious of being involved in drug importation despite removing white powder and depositing it into unknown persons’ car boots from the outset of the importation scheme is implausible.”
She described his evidence as “entirely self-serving”.
“The sheer scale and numbers of hours required to repackage and distribute the hundreds of kilograms of drugs and disposal of the coconut carries with it the inference that drug offending was your primary employment over this period.”
Judge Lummis ordered the maximum starting point of eight years for the final 431kg import then added uplifts of two years for each of the additional charges, resulting in an overall starting point of 22 years’ imprisonment. She then allowed 30% in reductions based on his guilty pleas the morning his trial was set to begin, prior good character, his assessed low-risk assessment of re-offending, his rehabilitation efforts and his family situation, including two disabled children.
The defence had also sought a discount to account for “Customs’ negligence” in allowing the imports to continue.
“I see no principled reason or justification to support such a discount,” she said.
The final prison sentence was 14 years and 10 months.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
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Glen Wright continues to deny the offending and claims the victims conspired against him.