 Gerald Hensley, the head of the Prime Minister's Department, wrote that a small group from the Reserve Bank, Police, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and intelligence agencies helped by the FBI and Washington's currency protection office investigated the people involved and uncovered "a convoluted rat-run of money-launderers, criminals and snake-oil salesman who had descended on the Pacific and our own Māori Affairs Department in the wake of the petrodollar boom".They were variants of the "brokered loan confidence game".The Arab connection was said to be a former Kuwaiti finance minister, plus other rogues like a retired Air Force general who was a "playboy and drunk", someone hinting of links to the CIA, a fashionable interior decorator and other "convicted fraudsters, bankrupts and promoters of collapsed companies".