Mysterious man at heart of tax-dodging scheme
Nelson woman Mila Amber tried to sell her two-storey Nelson villa in a tax-dodging scheme. But the deeper story was stranger. Amy Ridout investigates a mysterious figure, cancer claims and a property deal gone wrong.
Kevin Collins’ appearance in the High Court at Wellington was unusual. Via audiovisual link from the UK, Collins appeared as the respondent in a case brought by the Official Assignee, the government body authorised to sell a person's assets to pay their creditors, against his company, Elite Telecomms, after it was involved in a dubious property purchase.
The hearing transcript, provided to Stuff after an application to the High Court, showed that Collins rambled, dodged questions and obfuscated. He went off on tangents about the Irish Catholic Church, the fall of the Soviet Union, and his marriage eligibility.
The hearing in May last year was to determine whether Collins’ purchase of a Nelson property was lawful. Collins had bought two-storey villa Amber House from Mila Amber, and the IRD believed the sale was an attempt to dodge paying tax.
But who is Kevin Collins? Stuff spoke to
former tenants, and people involved in his companies. None had met him. However, they had all dealt with the colourful character Gaimhreadhan O’Coileain, Mila Amber’s husband.
Associate judge Owen Paulsen noted that Collins was not a credible witness. His thought processes were “odd”, the judge said. And of his evidence: “it is implausible and, often, defies belief”.
The judge cancelled the sale, and ordered the property to be handed to the Official Assignee.
Amber House
Mila Amber bought Amber House in 2004. The property was a B&B, a boarding house, and is now for sale to recover tax debts.
Mila’s husband, O’Coileain, also known as George Amber, is an Irish resident who divides his time between New Zealand
and Ireland. There is no record of him starting any businesses here, or owning property. However, he was declared bankrupt in 2021.
Although the couple, who have two children, officially split in 2005, they appear to live together, and are currently in Ireland.
In 2017, Mila transferred the B&B company, which had cycled through several names before landing on Abbey Services (Killed by Tax Maladministration) Ltd, to Kevin Collins.
Meanwhile, the IRD was looking into her tax affairs. After a four-year investigation, they told Mila she owed $110,000 in taxes. This was later revised to $365,000. Days after learning about the debt, Mila arranged to sell the home to Collins, in what Judge Paulsen called a “scheme to defeat the IRD”.
The judge noted the “unusual” move had little benefit to Mila, but many advantages for Collins.
Under the agreement, Collins was not required to pay a deposit, or interest on the $847,000 sale, and he would pay for the property over 25 years. Under that schedule Collins, whose birth date was listed in paperwork as 1944, would have made the final payment aged 98.
Who is Kevin Collins?
While Collins appeared as the respondent in the High Court, he has proved a difficult man to pin down. Stuff asked the High Court for information relating to his identity and his appearance via audiovisual link.
“The Court has no record of where participants are joining from,” a spokesperson said. “The Registry provides a URL link and passcode to the participants ... the Court has no capability to geolock our connections.”
When Stuff asked The Office of the Chief Justice what checks are done to ensure the person appearing is who they claim to be, a spokesperson said judges relied on lawyers regarding the “identity and bona fides” of those appearing in person or remotely.
When Stuff phoned O’Coileain to ask about Kevin Collins’ identity, he avoided the question.
To a request for Collins’ phone number, O’Coileain said: “No. I am in Ireland, Kevin is in Scotland. Goodbye.”
He did not respond to further calls or emails, and neither did his wife Mila. His son, Adam, hung up when Stuff called him to ask about Collins’ identity.
Collins’ affidavit says he visited New Zealand in 2017 – four years after buying the B&B company – to buy a property through his company, Elite Telecomms. Registered in Scotland, there is no record of the company trading or having any contracts in New Zealand or in the UK.
Collins picked Nelson after a suggestion from his property manager, a Czech named Radek Taus, the affidavit said. (The only trace of Radek Taus online is a UK business he was involved with in 2003. The director was a George Collins. O’Coileain did not respond to questions about their identities, and emails to Taus went unanswered.)
According to the affidavit, Taus introduced Collins to his friend, Mila Amber. In a strange twist of fate, Collins realised he was related to O’Coileain, he explained.
Collins is the director of several New Zealand companies. Some are associated with the Amber House business, but others never traded. None of the other directors or shareholders Stuff contacted had ever met Collins. However, they knew O’Coileain. One former director said he agreed to become part of a company as a favour to O'Coileain, who had told him he wasn’t permitted to start businesses in New Zealand.
The man, a former refugee with an entrepreneurial streak, said he wasn’t required to do anything in his role. He had never heard of fellow director Kevin Collins: his dealings had been with O’Coileain.
Another former director, Joseph Angelo, does not remember meeting Collins.
However, Collins appeared to know him, and brought him up during the High Court hearing: “He is a bit of a strange man,” he told the court, describing Angelo’s life in a “hippy dippy commune”. “He is a person that believes that 5G cell towers are going to fry his brain.”
Angelo does, however, know O’Coileain, who he calls his “retired attorney friend”. (O’Coileain encouraged Angelo to escalate his own battle to the High Court, which he lost, incurring costs of $20,000.)
Scathing reviews
The online reviews for Amber House’s time as a B&B are scathing.
“Horrendous stay,” wrote one reviewer, adding that O’Coileain had “no boundaries”.
Another wrote: “In my 30 years of travel I’ve stayed at many B&B's and this would have to be the worst one. Pushy owner, no privacy. The owner stalked our family and stayed outside our room until 1.30am.”
The B&B’s website is dense with rules (“do not eat in your bedroom lest Argentine ants follow your food trail”), instructions (“depress the switch”), and gripes about guests (“How much effort does it really take to flick a switch?”).
Australian Dale Strimling stayed at Amber House in 2017, and later wrote a review explaining he’d been “ripped off” when his credit card was unexpectedly charged.
In response, O’Coileain created a page on his website. “Do Dale Strimling’s interactions amount to the criminal offence of blackmail?”
The lengthy page includes emails, an audio clip of a conversation, and O’Coileain’s requirements for Strimling’s proposed five-week stay.
Weirdly, this included Strimling meeting “the legal costs of drafting and executing a formal tailor-made written agreement”.
“Googling my name does throw sand on my Tinder game,” Strimling wrote in a message to Stuff. “[But] people who know me, know that [O’Coileain’s claims are] a load of trash.”
Later, Strimling was happy to answer the IRD’s questions during their investigation into Mila’s tax affairs.
“He was always coming over”
For a while, the property offered rental accommodation, with boarders living in the main house and tenants living in a small sleepout.
Sonia Corbett, who lived in the sleepout and later went to the Tenancy Tribunal, said O’Coileain tracked her movements: what time she shut the curtains, went out, turned on the light. “He was always coming over,” Corbett says.
The sleepout was miserable, with dingy curtains, holes in the walls, and a leaking roof, she said. However, when Corbett complained, O’Coileain deferred to Collins.
O’Coileain claimed Collins lived in Scotland, and was terminally ill, Corbett says. However, Collins, as well as others including Radek Taus, sent her long emails, cc’ing O’Coileain’s friends, neighbours, court officials and O’Coileain, referred to as the “company attorney”. The emails were obsessive and pernickety. In one, Collins instructs Corbett to remove lichen from the property’s fences.
In another, Collins told Corbett to “specifically check for emails at least once daily and respond comprehensively within 26 hours of the timestamp on incoming emails using an interleaved style with trimmed quoting”.
Corbett believes the emails all came from O’Coileain.
“The vocabulary and style are exactly the same, and they are [O’Coileain’s] speaking style. It is very obvious that a Czech man, a young Chinese man, an old Irish man and a younger New Zealander would not all write in the same way. “
O’Coileain told Corbett he was an “attorney with an international career,” and had won eight cases in New Zealand, she says. However, O’Coileain is not registered to practice law in New Zealand.
Boils, hail and thunder
In 2020, a former boarder contacted Stuff with a tale of being “bullied and harrassed”, by O’Coileain.
Joseph Francis said on paper, O’Coileain’s teenage son, Adam Amber, was his landlord. But the emails that came from Adam were written by O’Coileain, Francis claims. His distinctive style was all over his correspondence, which was constant, he says.
“Every day he would come up with new rules. His rule book started off with 20 rules. After less than three weeks, it was up to 35 rules.”
One absolved the landlord from “acts of God”, including “floods of blood and water, plagues of frogs, creeping things upon the earth, flies, cattle, boils, hail and thunder, locusts, [and] darkness over the land of Egypt”.
Francis and his friends moved out after O’Coileain tried to make them pay a power bill that pre-dated their time in the house. When O’Coileain told the boarders there would be “blood on the floor” if they didn’t pay up, they called the police.
Later, they went to court to try and recover their bond. The court awarded them $1700, but because O’Coileain’s son was their landlord, the teenager was required to repay the boarders, Francis says. “Everything was [O’Coileain] in the background ... Adam was just a scapegoat, just a name.”
Court action
O’Coileain faces criminal charges here and in Ireland.
In February 2021, he was charged with dangerous driving after he allegedly pulled out in front of a car. A police summary said O’Coileain overtook the driver, braked suddenly, then sped away, crossing the centre line into oncoming traffic.
Corbett remembers her own hair-raising experience of O’Coileain’s driving: a trip to Bunnings where she braced herself in the passenger’s seat as he pulled out in front of someone.
“He said, [giving way here] is a stupid rule; it’s much more efficient for me to go first,” Corbett says. “He doesn’t like our rules, so he just makes up his own.”
In October, The New Zealand Herald reported that O’Coileain’s driving case had been called 24 times without resolution. Through a lawyer, he said he was stuck in Ireland, having been required to surrender his passport.
A spokesperson for Ireland’s Court Services confirmed O’Coileain faces charges of providing “false or misleading” documents when applying for a passport in 2015 and 2022.
While Collins’ affidavit to the High Court claimed O’Coileain had terminal lung cancer, O’Coileain told the Nelson District Court last year that he had a brain tumour. Meanwhile, he told Corbett he had “kidney cancer”.
O’Coileain has form for proclaiming terminal illness. In 2007, he was a prolific Wikipedia editor. So was an account with the name W Frank. The two accounts edited articles about weather in Nelson and the Irish military. Then, after accusations surfaced in Wikipedia chats that a single person was behind both accounts (a breach of Wikipedia rules), W Frank took to an editors’ chat page to make an announcement. “Gaimhreadhan [O’Coileain], who many of you will have known and interacted with, has died following a long illness,” W Frank wrote.
Condolences flowed, with one poster pointing out Gaimhreadhan’s “zestful participation up until the last hours of his life”.
“Every day he would come up with new rules.”
Former boarder Joseph Francis who said he was bullied by O’Coileain.