The Sydney property developer chasing $28 million in stolen cash

Matthew Trickett was paid to find people. The former British Royal Marine tracked down Somali pirates and Taliban fighters while he was in the armed forces. Then he started a security consultancy and tailed Hong Kong dissidents in Britain.

In May, he was found dead in a British park.

Trickett, 37, had just been charged by UK police with committing national security offences in a case that has seen Trickett and two other men accused of spying for Hong Kong’s foreign intelligence service.

Trickett’s targets included Nathan Law and Finn Lau, two of Hong Kong’s most prominent exiles and critics of the Chinese Communist Party.

But they also included Monica Kwong, a Hong Kong-based employee of an Australian property developer, TWT Global.

Kwong moved to London in December after she allegedly stole $28 million from two companies – Yearshine Investments and TWT Global – together with three other people between July 2022 and October 2023, a Hong Kong court heard in July.

Corporate documents in Hong Kong and Australia reveal Yearshine and TWT are owned by Tina Zou, a glamorous 41-year-old, Wenona-educated Sydney property developer who shot to prominence for her luxurious redevelopments in Pyrmont and St Leonards while amassing a $500 million property fortune.

In Hong Kong, Zou’s companies Yearshine Investments and TWT Global are now locked in a legal dispute with Kwong over the alleged theft of millions of dollars from her companies.

The Hong Kong High Court heard in July that Zou has also been named in one of the UK’s most high-profile espionage cases over her role in commissioning Trickett to track down her former employee.

Zou is not a party to the London case and her lawyer Gary Leung said in the Hong Kong High Court in July that she is “off the hook”.

But the collision of the two cases raised questions in the Hong Kong court about the links between the wealthy Sydney property mogul and Hong Kong’s state security apparatus.

Why did the Sydney property mogul hire the same security consultants to track down a former employee that the Hong Kong government also used to find dissidents in London?

The glamorous Sydney property developer

In Australia, Zou, also known as Tina Tian, transformed rundown lots in Bondi Junction and Ultimo into luxury apartments filled with sculptures by Janet Laurence and paintings by Judy Millar.

In 2018, The Australian Financial Review described Zou as a “modern Medici” for giving artists studio space in St Leonards in return for adding one of their artworks to her collection.

The philanthropist would go on to bankroll major contemporary arts festival the Biennale of Sydney and fund mental health services through her charity the Bridging Hope Fund, which partners with the University of NSW to fund the Big Anxiety Research Centre.

But Sydney soon grew too small for Zou, who labelled it lonely and boring with nowhere to go after 7pm.

“This is where I’ll retire maybe,” she said in an interview with this masthead in 2018.

Zou returned to Hong Kong, one of the world’s most competitive property markets, where Yearshine and TWT spread their footprints.

Employees of TWT in Sydney say they have not seen the “distinguished lady” in five years as the Asian financial hub became the focus of Zou’s attention.

It would also be where the company hit financial turbulence.

Hong Kong dreams

The new headquarters in Hong Kong was meant to be the company’s “new global head office”, which would “curate communities globally” when it was established in 2018.

From here, TWT would run its developments around the world, including in Beijing, Hong Kong and Sydney.

On Wednesday, TWT called for expressions of interest in its latest development, “The Collective” in Crows Nest, which pledged to blend village and city life in a 12-storey building just north of the Sydney CBD.

But its global headquarters in Hong Kong is now just an empty office in a rundown commercial block in the city’s centre.

When this masthead recently visited, a black curtain was drawn across the door, concealing the interior from view.

Next door, an office is used as locker space for workers at a nearby Italian seafood restaurant.

One worker who used the lockers daily, but declined to give her name, said the last time she had seen the lights on next door had been at least four months earlier.

Zou did not respond to numerous requests through her company and lawyers for comment on how the two court cases had affected her business operations.

Woody Wu, the operations manager for TWT Australia, said Zou was the victim of a serious financial crime and “continues to suffer great distress”.

“The criminal proceedings against the three men in London regarding the National Security Act do not relate [to] her at all,” he said.

Kwong, who like Zou did not attend a civil hearing in July in Hong Kong over the missing millions, has also disappeared from public view.

For 40 years, the Kwong family lived in an unpretentious suburban housing block in Hong Kong’s outer suburbs, about 20 minutes’ drive north of the city centre.

But they suddenly sold up and moved out in early May. The Kwong family’s departure surprised neighbours, who had become accustomed to seeing her parents in the hallways and exchanging small talk in the elevator.

“They were a pretty nice family. They would say ‘hi’ when we would run into each other in the corridor,” one long-term neighbour said.

Another neighbour was shocked when told about the allegations against Kwong, saying little passed for gossip in the housing block, where residents mostly kept to themselves.

The espionage case that has gripped London

Those allegations came to a head in May at Westminster Magistrate’s Court in London, where the court heard that Trickett was commissioned to recover the $28 million in missing cash. Kwong has denied the allegations.

Trickett and Peter Wai, a British Border Force officer, allegedly ran surveillance on Kwong, including obtaining her passport and financial details through restricted-access systems and monitoring her address.

The two were connected by retired Hong Kong police officer Wing Cheuk and Chung Biu Yuen, a manager at Hong Kong’s Economic and Trade Office, the territory’s de facto consulate in London.

In April, Trickett posed as “Dave from Maintenance” to try and access her third-floor apartment in Pontefract, just outside Leeds, according to the UK prosecutor’s document reported on by HK01 and Yahoo News.

When Kwong did not respond, Wai and Trickett simulated a leak by pouring water outside her door to try and flush her out of her home.

“That’s scared her,” Trickett is heard to say on a body camera recording outside the apartment.

Trickett was arrested on May 1 after breaking into Kwong’s apartment. He was charged with national security offences on May 13 and found dead in a Berkshire park on May 25.

British police are not treating the death as suspicious.

Hong Kong officials are now calling for British authorities to “give an open account of the incident as soon as possible” to “prevent unwarranted speculation” over the role of Hong Kong’s Economic and Trade Office in organising the surveillance.

The Kwong surveillance commissioned by Zou led to Trickett’s arrest for his surveillance of Hong Kong dissidents, which was revealed by the contents of the phone he stuffed into his underpants before his arrest.

Inside the Hong Kong court in July, Deputy Judge Phoebe Man asked Zou’s barrister Leung whether Zou or her companies paid for Trickett and his associates to surveil Kwong.

“My lady, my understanding is that the money wasn’t paid by the first [Yearshine Investments] or second plaintiff [TWT Global], but paid by the founder, Ms Tina Zou,” Leung said.

“As to why these certain people, including a Matthew Trickett, why he has now been prosecuted is not related to this investigation,” Leung added, referring to the ongoing espionage case in the UK.

“That’s why Ms Tina Zou is now essentially off the hook.”

Outside the courtroom, Leung said the two matters were “entirely unrelated” and Zou had been coincidentally “caught up” in the other case and that her matter was a “simple recovery of a stolen debt”.

When pressed on why she had chosen to hire private investigators to find Kwong in the UK, rather than leave the matter to the police, Leung claimed this was due to the challenge of tracking down Kwong.

“Because of the difficulty of this case, even for us as lawyers, we can’t locate her.”

Wu, the TWT operations manager, said any “publication that implies Mr Trickett’s death was related to Ms Tian [Zou] is false”.

TWT Australia

TWT Australia did not respond to requests for comment on the impact of the case and the missing $28 million on its local operations

Inside the company’s head office at TWT House in St Leonards, a painting of three black crows dominates the lobby.

Employees said they were unaware of the financial misfortune that had befallen their owner.

One described the case as “very confidential” but did not elaborate further. Another associate said they were surprised by the allegations.

No one answered the door at the unit used as the business address for more than a dozen Australian companies still registered under Zou’s name.

The headquarters of Zou’s charity next door, the Bridging Hope Fund, are largely empty apart from artworks scattered around the office, a fridge, unopened mail and dust piling up in studios that can be seen through the front window.

Property developer Stephen Fitzpatrick, who is still listed as co-director for the charity on its website, said he has not been connected with the foundation for more than seven years.

“I’m not really involved with those guys any more,” he said.

Artist Abdul Abdullah, who worked in a TWT art collective studio, said Zou had provided him with space to let his creativity flourish when other developers would not.

“She was very nice and professional when we met,” he said. “Where once artists worked in rundown spaces nobody else wanted, now these spaces are development opportunities, and we get squeezed out.”

The front doors of the TWT Art Collective are now covered in cobwebs.

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