Continuing with The Crimes of Patriots,A True Tale of Dope,
Dirty Money & The CIA, By Jonathan Kwitny.

.... Nugan Hand told the world it made money in two ways: first, by arbitraging the customers' deposits on the commercial money market (paying the customers one interest rate to get their money, then obtaining a slightly higher rate by investing the money in corporate debt notes) and second, by collecting commissions for facilitating international trade deals.

Yet records indicate that the interest rates Nugan Hand earned on the money market were consistently much lower than the rates it paid to depositors. For the most part, Nugan Hand offered certificates of deposit (fixed-term, lump-sum deposits) paying 10 to 15 percent interest, then turned around and invested in similar CDs issued by legitimate Australian banks and paying 9 or 10 percent.

This is not a surefire way to make money. It is, rather, a surefire way to lose money. And the Hong Kong liquidator's office calculated that from 1976 to its demise, Nugan Hand lost $7.9 million trading securities. The much-ballyhooed international trade business also was deeply in the red.

But these banking operations were really just a polite front for the actual business of Nugan Hand. The kind of deal the company thrived on was the kind offered to L. P. Barnes and Arnold Waters, commercial farmers from near Wudinna in the state of South Australia (details as gathered by John O'Brien, the Sydney liquidator).

Each year from 1976 through 1979 (possibly except 1977), the two farmers gave Nugan Hand (via its Yorkville Nominees affiliate) an amount of money they wanted sheltered from Australian income tax. And each year, Nugan Hand would keep 22 percent of the money and return the rest along with Frank Nugan's legal opinion that the farmers did not have to declare it as income.

The legal smokescreen for the tax exemption was a phony sharecropper arrangement.
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