AUCKLAND — Three men were sentenced in Auckland’s High Court this week for their role in receiving the largest methamphetamine seizure ever recorded at New Zealand’s border, which arrived from Vancouver’s port concealed in maple syrup bottles. Customs officers intercepted 713.8 kilograms of the drug in January 2023, enough for roughly 35 million doses and calculated to equate to NZ$800 million in drug harms. The shipment, stacked on 18 pallets and disguised as four-litre syrup jugs, was routed through a global node for Chinese chemical precursor trafficking and synthetic drug production.
Wenfu Zhang, 31, was sentenced to 10 years and 10 months for importing methamphetamine, while Tayzel Tini and Liam Prasad, both 24, each received seven years. Police described the two younger men as “catchers,” hired to unpack the freight, with the drugs bound for the wider Australasian market.
The maple-syrup consignment was not an isolated operation, according to New Zealand Police. In parallel, Australian authorities launched Operation Parkes after the Canada Border Services Agency identified another suspicious Canadian export — 18 pallets of canola oil shipped from Vancouver to Melbourne.
Inside, investigators uncovered three tonnes of methamphetamine, one of the largest hauls in Australian history. That seizure led to multiple arrests in Melbourne, and it is believed both cases were orchestrated by the same syndicate coordinating bulk Chinese narcotics exports from Canada into the Pacific region.