NZ News
Gulf Harbour body trial: Religious group leader, wife jailed over manslaughter, kidnapping
The leader of a fringe religious group Kaixiao Liu has been sentenced to 10 years and five months imprisonment for the manslaughter and kidnapping of one of his followers – 70-year-old Shulai Wang.
His wife, Lanyue Xiao, received a sentence of seven years and 11 months for her role.
Wang, from Hainan, China, was found wrapped in layers of black rubbish bags in Auckland’s Gulf Harbour in March 2024, eight months after she arrived in the country to follow the religious instructions of Liu.
RNZ / Nick Monro
Liu’s mother, Xiuyun Li, and father, Jingui Liu, were also convicted in June – Li of kidnapping and Jingui Liu of misconduct to human remains.
They will be sentenced later this year, due to more material they plan to place before the court.
Wang and five other women from China stayed with Liu and his family in Ōrewa, where the Crown said Wang was punished for not complying with the strict rules of the household, and later put in a suitcase, denied food and water, following a failed escape just days before her death.
On Tuesday morning, Justice Mathew Downs handed Liu the prison sentence at Auckland’s High Court.
RNZ / Nick Monro
Liu’s sentence, with a minimum non-parole period of 50 percent of his sentence, also covered Liu’s convictions for interfering with human remains, perverting the course of justice and failing to give device passwords to police during a search warrant.
Xiao received a sentence of seven years and 11 months for kidnapping, manslaughter, perverting the course of justice and interfering with human remains.
Justice Downs didn’t impose a minimum non-parole period for Xiao, acknowledging her lesser culpability compared to Liu, who made all the key decisions relating to Wang’s detention and punishment.
He said Liu and Xiao’s offending had several aggravating factors, including detaining Wang for 38 hours and restraining her for much of the period, taping her mouth to stop her from screaming, denying food and water – all whilst knowing that she was a 70-year-old overstayer who was entirely dependent on them.
Justice Downs emphasised Liu’s position as the ring leader and his “callous indifference” to Wang and the other women in the house, referring to the evidence heard in trial that Liu had kept the black pushchair used to dispose of Wang’s body and the black bed she was detained in as warnings to the other women in the house, telling them that the colour black represented death.
Nick Monro
Turning to Xiao, Justice Downs said while she was not as culpable as he is, she was the next most culpable given her status in the household.
Justice Downs said he had observed Xiao during the trial and seen her disagree with her husband, and seen that at times her husband deferred to her.
“If you had sought to dissuade Mr Liu from the offending, there is a very real prospect he might have been so dissuaded,” he said.
The sentences for Liu and Xiao included a 5 percent discount for the consideration that neither of them had previous convictions.
Justice Downs said he was not persuaded by submissions for either defendants’ good work or character references.
The judge also decided on no discounts on compassionate grounds for Liu’s separation from his five children – four of whom were uplifted by Oranga Tamariki in September 2024 – and the youngest who was uplifted following the conclusion of the trial in June.
RNZ / Nick Monro
Liu’s lawyer, Ron Mansfield KC, who did not represent him in the trial but is now representing him on appeal matters, had asked Justice Downs for leniency and compassion on several factors.
Mansfield said while Liu still doesn’t accept the Crown’s version of events, he does have remorse for the loss of life in his home.
“He is not a cult leader, nor require people to follow his cult,” Mansfield said, adding that Liu had people who followed him as a result of his music, not his preaching.
Mansfield said life in custody for any foreign national is more difficult, and that there are positives in Liu’s life such as being a parent and wanting to return to his children and family life.
Mansfield said the removal of the children had played a significant part in the proceeding in leading Liu to mistrust authority and the criminal process, and that the mistrust had led to Liu’s inability to trust counsel appointed during the trial, which drove the way in which the trial was conducted.
Source: RNZ
Latest News
Opportunities to mitigate multi-million-dollar RNZ budget blowout likely missed – experts
Multiple opportunities to identify and mitigate a multi-million-dollar budget blowout at RNZ appear have been missed, according to the former executive director at Audit New Zealand.
The public broadcaster on Monday revealed a near $12 million shock financial loss after a litany of financial blunders, which will now lead to sweeping job cuts.
The $11.8m loss is more than 25 times the $470,000 RNZ had expected to lose over the year to June.
CEO Paul Thompson took responsibility for the result, and said internal reports gave an inaccurate picture of the finances, meaning the scale of the loss only became clear in October.
RNZ’s former chief financial officer Hilary Parker resigned unexpectedly in early October.
The board said it would commission an independent review into what went wrong.
Independent contractor Stephen Walker, who left the Audit Office earlier this year, said the size of the loss was surprising, as was the length of time it took to identify it – months after the financial year ended.
Supplied / OAG
“Probably more of a concern is that they had seemingly been unaware that they were running up a significant deficit until they were in the preparation stage of their annual report in October.”
Walker said public entities typically produced monthly financial reports.
An interim audit also took place before the end of the financial year, he said, but if the organisation hadn’t identified significant losses at that stage, the auditor could also be in the dark.
“It seems that there’s a real weakness in forecasting and budgeting that’s occurred here and that the monthly accounts, when they’re produced, either haven’t identified these significant variances against budget or the magnitude of them really hasn’t come to light until right towards the end of the financial year,” Walker said.
“And really at that point, there’s no opportunity for the chief executive, the leadership team to take, and the board to take, any corrective action because the year has effectively been completed.”
Walker said the “significant miss” was difficult to account for given it was more than 10 percent of RNZ’s total funding.
He said based on RNZ’s annual report, financial complexity didn’t appear to be a factor.
“This $11.8m loss isn’t made up of one particular item … it seems to have been contributed to by a number of separate expense lines running over budget. So I don’t think it’s necessarily to do with complexity.”
Among the errors, RNZ wrongly counted $2m from land sales as income in its budget. Staff costs also came in $3.2m over budget, including $1.4m in redundancy payments.
Professor at Auckland University’s business school Norman Wong said based on media reports the issues identified were “significant and troubling”.
Supplied / University of Auckland
“But recognising the sale of land as income in their budget is a basic error that one would have expected to have been caught and corrected well before it got to this point.”
With funding reductions at RNZ over the past two years, Walker expected greater scrutiny of financial results.
“Virtually every public entity has had their annual budget reduced. And so you would expect … the leadership team on a monthly basis and board – I’m not sure how frequently the board will consider the information – but you would expect them to be interrogating the results on a regular basis throughout the year,” he said.
Walker said initiating an independent review was the correct course of action and that he’d want to understand what information the leadership team and the board were regularly receiving.
He said he’d “love to say” surprising financial results were rare, but conceded they occured on a semi-frequent basis during his time leading the Audit Office.
“The benefit of independent scrutiny by the Audit Office – and the auditors providing that support to the Auditor General – [is] that the reporting is fairly presented at the end of the year, whether it’s good, bad or ugly.”
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