Charlotte Grieve spoke extensively with Gunnar Helgason about Euro Pacific Bank’s robust KYC and AML procedures. Yet, in her Age article, Grieve lied about what Helgason actually said. She deliberately created the false impression that he told her Euro Pacific Bank had lax compliance and didn’t ask him many questions. This is not just defamation; it’s fraud. Her own witness refuted her entire case. This was not an investigation. An investigation is an attempt to find the truth. Grieve wanted to bury the truth and used the pretense of an investigation to give credibility to a lie.
Here is what she wrote about Helgason in The Age article: “The bank never asked him about his past, Helgason says, only lots of standard check-the-box questions. “No one at Euro Pacific Bank said: Can we have a copy of your most up-to-date CV? And by the way, don’t leave anything out,” he recalls.’
Compare that to what Helgason actually told her.
On the bottom of page 12, Grieve asked Helgonson how he would describe the process of opening his Euro Pacific Bank account and if it was a fairly straightforward process? His response on the top of page 13 includes the following;
“No. I was asked questions. I was asked the questions that typically a Caribbean bank wouldn’t ask. I really was, in my opinion, vetted the way a properly regulated bank would vet its clients. They asked me where are my transactions originating? What am I shipping? How often am I shipping? How often do I expect payments? How often do I expect to make outwork remittances? What do I estimate?
They said, ‘Look. Obviously, we know that this is essentially a new business for you, but how much are you going to do over the course of the next 12 months?’ And then I’m pretty sure was every single transaction over a certain amount. I think I had sent a reimbursement to someone and it was a couple of hundred American dollars. And they said, ‘Oh yeah, we don’t need any paperwork for that.’ But everything else required an invoice or at the very least a copy of a email, a copy of correspondence. They were certainly doing everything that, if you were a banking regulator and you called me and asked me, do I think that Euro Pacific was following the banking rules and regulations of the day at that time, I would say, yes.”
This is proof that Grieve lied. She was told how strict Euro Pacific’s compliance was, not just by Helgonson, but by every other customer and referral agent she spoke with. Yet she not only lied about that in The Age article (McKenzie also lied about that during the 60 Minutes broadcast,) but she also lied about what Helgonson told her. He told her the bank asked questions that went above and beyond what he would have expected. She wrote that he claimed the bank never asked about his past and just asked standard, check-the-box questions.
The purpose of her lie was to create the false impression that the bank had lax compliance, when she knew the opposite was true. She was trying to give credibility to the J5’s investigation by making it look like the bank was actually guilty of facilitating tax evasion and money laundering—crimes which her own investigation revealed were unlikely to have been committed. The fact that the investigation ended with out any charges being filed against anyone confirms what her own investigation revealed.