The ‘dark capital’ strategy became the star in Nugan Hand Bank’s business plan, with Clive Collings designated to lead the Hong Kong office. Michael Hand and Bernie Houghton put the arrangements in place in the tax haven British colony before Hand's 1975 departure on African business (Sourcewatch). With the respectability in banking that Hong Kong’s Wing-On Bank conferred on Nugan Hand, its Hong Kong office grew to a dozen full-timers plus support staff, led by Collings on $250,000 a year according to former colleagues.
Nugan Hand's dope clients wanted to get money across international
boundaries without attracting the attention of authorities, as did the same and
other bank clients for the purposes of tax evasion. Nugan Hand's coveted bank charter to move money internationally wasn't revoked until the 1980 liquidation of the company. There are many agencies that haven't explained why their officials failed to question Nugan
Hand’s illegal practices when they became apparent during the 1970s (Complicit officials).
Les Collings was one of numerous ex-DFA sales reps which Nugan Hand steadily recruited in the early-to-mid 1970s. DFA, Dollar Fund of Australia, was the mutual fund that in 1974 stopped redeeming its investors’ shares. (Brit-born Clive “Les” Collings came to Australia in 1960 aged 23 with a grammar school education and career experience as a deck apprentice on an oil tanker – according to the version he gave Kwitny despite reference in the Stewart Royal Commission’s report to him as a deck officer.)
DFA had an elite group of salesmen, Collings told
Kwitny. To Kwitny’s question about what happened to its unlucky investors,
Collings said they would probably still be holding the securities, adding: ‘Peter
Dunn and [Jerry] Gilder were with that firm. [Frank] Ward was the
administrator. There were 18 guys around the world and we were just suddenly
told by cable that we had to pay our own way home’.
Kwitny commented: “There is wonder in his eyes as he speaks of this hustler’s pantheon, and it becomes clear who are the true objects of his sympathy. The money those people [DFA clients] worked for and saved, perhaps over the course of a lifetime, is gone forever.”
Some ex-DFA reps lasted only about a year with Nugan Hand, like Dunn and Ward. But Gilder and Collings were in for much longer. Collings joined with Karl Schuller to assist a fellow ex-DFA salesman already in the Sydney office, Wilhelmus Hans. They made lots of money on the gold and silver market there, Schuller later told John O’Brien, the Sydney-based liquidator for Nugan Hand (who earlier was DFA’s liquidator too.)
This was in Nugan Hand’s earlier-1970s commodities business strategy, when coin dealer and silver specialist George Shaw came into Nugan Hand Sydney. Lebanon-born Shaw developed Nugan Hand’s drug money dealings with Australia’s Lebanese community, using his Chinese friend Andrew Lowe for Chinese community dealings. Lowe’s commodity speciality was number four grade (pure) heroin, importing as much as 60 pounds at a time until caught and imprisoned in 1978.
Nugan’s get rich quick strategy of “cheat-the-cheaters” is clear in what Shaw later told the Stewart Royal Commission: “The whole purpose was to attract people with ‘black money’ [what we call ‘dark capital’] and to assure them that their anonymity would be preserved.”
*From Kwitny's pages 14, 143-44, 181