A young couple bought a house and found $232,000 hidden in the roof space. Should they be allowed to keep it?<\/p>\n
This was the question pondered by a judge after the couple called police to report that five sealed plastic bags of cash had been discovered under the insulation in their ceiling.<\/p>\n
The police say the money is probably “tainted” as the proceeds of criminal activity – most likely drug dealing – so it is liable to be seized and handed over to the Crown.<\/p>\n
The couple said that even if it is tainted, they are not the criminals.<\/p>\n
They maintain the link between any criminal act and the cash was broken when, as innocent parties, they bought the property.<\/p>\n
For now, High Court Justice Rachel Dunningham has sided with the police and issued a restraining order over the money.<\/p>\n
However, the couple will get another chance to make their case when the police take the next step in the proceedings and apply to have the money forfeited to the Crown.<\/p>\n
rnz<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A young couple bought a house and found $232,000 hidden in the roof space. Should they be allowed to keep it? This was the question pondered by a judge after the couple called police to report that five sealed plastic bags of cash had been discovered under the insulation in their ceiling. The police say […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":11285,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11284"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11286,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11284\/revisions\/11286"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}