KEY POINTS:
Few would have suspected back in May that the gang-related shooting of a little girl - Jhia Te Tua - would lead to the demise of an office in charge of hunting out and punishing the slippery dealings of white-collar criminals.
Yet it was the flurry of action
the Government ordered from officials following the shooting of the 2-year-old in Wanganui that led to the decision, announced this week, to disband the Serious Fraud Office and merge it into the police department. What the child's shooting prompted was a clampdown on organised crime.
When in 1989 Prime Minister and Attorney General Geoffrey Palmer announced a Serious Fraud Office was to be set up to fight white-collar offending, he declared it to be "the crime of the future".
The decision came off the back of the 1987 sharemarket crash, and the glut of company collapses and what Palmer described as "dubious entrepreneurial activity" that ensued.
The SFO came into being - vested with special powers beyond those held by any other agency, a brief to poke into places others dare not venture, and staffed by a squad of highly specialised forensics investigators, lawyers and prosecutors.
Now, 17 years later, the Government has decided the SFO is to be disbanded and its role subsumed into a new police-based agency set up to tackle a new crime of the future - organised crime.
The justification seemed to be not that white-collar crime was passe, but rather that other kinds of crime had caught up, and the skills of the SFO were needed to help catch them.
Announcing the decision, police minister Annette King said the decision was simple "common sense" - combining the fraud-buster skills of the SFO with those of the police would make a stronger whole.
"The SFO was a creature of a time when there was a difference between serious fraud and other kinds of crime," she said. "Those involved in organised crime have moved on. We have to move on to keep ahead of these people."
"Organised crime" in the modern age includes cyber crime, identity theft and fraud, money laundering, extortion, blackmail, drug manufacturing - and fraud. It now takes the skills of white-collar crime investigators to get into the details of these types of crime.
What the agency proved, according to justice minister Mark Burton, was "exactly how committed and serious we are". But some have queried whether the Government's promises to stamp out the scourge of gang-related crimes meant it was no longer quite so committed and serious about traditional white-collar crime.
Former director of the SFO Chas Sturt described the move as "an enormous Christmas present for all fraudsters".
He fears that, without having the specific focus of corporate fraud, scenarios such as the prosecution of Keith Hancox - whom Sturt began investigating for embezzlement of Sports Foundation money after a gossipy social chat about Hancox's lavish lifestyle - and of former MP Donna Awatere-Huata, prosecuted and jailed for misusing money from the Pipi Foundation might be missed.
'What's being done now is relegating an organisation like the SFO, which is dealing with a major law and order problem, into something that becomes part of a little unit involved in organised crime, and where the major function is more police-oriented, street crime in its various forms."
King denies corporate fraud investigation will slip through the cracks.
"That's just an assumption - it's not going to be the reality. You can ensure that by setting what the goals are within the agency, and fraud is one of the priorities. That's just speculation from people who perhaps would rather leave things as they are."
A recommendation to put the SFO into the fold of the police came from none other than the man who set the office up in the first place - Sir Geoffrey Palmer.
Times have since changed, he says - so when his Law Commission was consulted, he recommended the merger.
The police force has been "transformed" and gained the expertise, such as forensic accountants, that it lacked in 1990.
"And the nature of serious and complex fraud has changed. There are many, many more international elements to it. There really are some big problems out there. There are enormous amounts of money slopping round the world and it's very hard to say where it's coming from and where it's getting laundered and who's doing it."
Now, he suggests, the SFO is too small to make most use of its abilities.
"You need a big agency to do that efficiently. It's too hard for a small agency like the SFO. They've done fine over the years, but I think it's time for a new approach."
Far better, he thinks, to have those highly skilled people in a broader agency where they can be moved across more cases.
"It does seem to me - and this is the view the Law Commission gave when consulted - that it was better to have those fraud activities concentrated in the police, because it would enable skills required to deal with serious crime to be brought to bear on other types of serious fraud as well, such as money laundering which is often associated with drug dealing.
"We thought it would make law enforcement a lot more effective in today's environment."
But Sturt maintains mixing police "street crime" and white-collar crime is an ill fit. The SFO works differently from other agencies because of the unique nature of white-collar criminals - usually educated and sophisticated, and very adept at hiding their trails.
"The evidence is complex, there is no smoking gun at the scene.
"In fact, there is no scene at all. And that structure of the SFO can not be replicated in a broader agency."
Deputy Commissioner of Police Rob Pope points out that police already successfully do a lot of fraud investigation - they have their own forensic accountants, e-crime units, company and fraud units.
"Organised crime has certainly evolved significantly over the past 10 to 15 years. It's spread its tentacles wider than how we would have envisaged criminals would operate in years gone past. And one of the key elements of organised crime is its ability to move money, to use financial institutions and manipulate financial instruments," Pope says. "In that sense, bringing the expertise of the Serious Fraud Office into the organised crime umbrella makes sense,"
There is perhaps a hint of a territorial turf war in Sturt's protestations, and he's not alone. The Law Society's Jonathan Krebs also believes resources would be diverted from white-collar crime and into physical crimes. He has questioned how much consultation went into the decision to drop the SFO.
Eyebrows have been raised at the apparent suddenness of the decision. Just two months earlier the SFO advertised for a new director to replace retiring director David Bradshaw.
The SFO's statement of intent for 2008 indicated its preparations were well under way to take on the expected Criminal Proceeds Bill which would allow it to strip profits gained through crimes from gangs and others.
And the SFO staff, now expected to shuttle their skills over to the new agency, were only told after it was a fait accompli - at 11am on the day it was made public.
The announcement was simply a skeleton of the idea, with no real details about how it would work, where it would be based, what its powers would be, who would head it. Further decisions are expected in October and the ministries of Justice and Police are nutting out all these matters.
The SFO itself has been fairly quiet on the issue.
Bradshaw sent a statement to the Herald which read like an obituary. It outlined the successes of the office - a consistent 90 per cent success rate in prosecutions, convictions of over 300 fraudsters, staff who "have shown a commitment over almost 20 years in assisting many New Zealanders who have been preyed on by fraudsters, some losing all of their life savings".
He makes no comment on whether he thinks the merger is a good idea, but his final sentence hints he will not roll over without some assurances being made.
"As director I will be seeking to ensure that in implementing the Government decision on organised crime, New Zealand retains the capability developed in the Serious Fraud Office."
Former SFO staff members are not so reticent. Among them is Jeremy Bioletti - an SFO prosecutor from 1990 to 1994 - who has since represented clients facing SFO prosecution. He thinks the decision is deluded. Corporate fraud remains a major issue even in times of a rosy economy.
"The spin by the Government that we no longer need the Serious Fraud Office because it was set up for the sharemarket crash in '87 is ridiculous. We have just had a string of finance company collapses.
"When this comes to an end and the public wants accountability there will be no one to look into it. History will repeat itself."
He and other former staff members also raise a more practical obstacle to the move - will the SFO experts actually want to go?
Bioletti is also not sure there will be as much success as the Government seems to think in actually getting the "specialist skills and expertise" through the doors of the new agency.
For a start, the SFO is based in Auckland, and while no final decision has been made, the new agency is likely to be based in Wellington.
"Many of them are professional accountants and lawyers. Why would they want to join an organisation run by the police? Without their brains and ability the police will simply not be up to the task."
A former forensic accountant in the unit, Tim Bradshaw, says there is an aversion among many in the office to working under the police banner, and laughed at the idea of the SFO accountants and civilian investigators leaping joyfully into police headquarters.
Much will depend on the detail, which the ministries of justice and police are nutting out. It will revolve around the powers the new unit is given, and how its different spheres of work are structured.
Pope says such concerns are understandable - but he can't address it fully until those details are properly worked out. What he's working toward is an end goal. The public outcry after Te Tua's shooting was the tipping point.
"We are determined to work with different agencies to provide what the public and everybody wants - a concerted approach around investigating and prosecuting organised crime. That's our commitment, that's what we want to achieve."
Sturt wishes him luck. But traditional corporate fraud is no less a problem than it ever was.
"Losing your life's savings can hurt just as much as a gunshot wound."
