In a run-down mall in one of Sydney's biggest Chinese neighbourhoods in 2015, 29-year-old Jizhang Lu showed up at the top-floor offices of a meat export company carrying a carrier bag stuffed with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.
According to police documents filed in court and reviewed by Reuters, Lu said he made the trip to the shopfront of CC&B International Pty Ltd eight times over three weeks. Each time a CC&B employee would hand him a receipt showing a different company had bought tens of thousands of kilograms of meat.
The cash - as much as A$530,200 (£320,389.2) at a time - was then deposited at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) branch, according to the police statement of facts agreed by Lu.
But the apparent purchases were fake, and last year Lu was jailed for two years after pleading guilty to helping launder A$3.2 million of what police allege were proceeds from an unidentified international drug syndicate.
The police case against Lu is now one of several being cited by financial intelligence agency AUSTRAC in its statement of claim against CBA, the largest civil court action of its kind in Australian corporate history.
AUSTRAC has accused CBA of "serious and systemic" breaches of money-laundering and counter-terrorism financing rules, alleging the country's second biggest mortgage lender failed to detect suspicious transactions nearly 54,000 times. It faces fines potentially amounting to billions of dollars.
CBA - which has had a branch in Malta since 2005, has said it will fight the AUSTRAC lawsuit, saying it would never deliberately undertake action that enables any form of crime. CBA said a coding error with new automated teller machines was behind most of the breaches but that it recognised there were "other serious allegations" in AUSTRAC's claim were unrelated to that software problem. It declined to comment specifically about the police case against Lu.
AUSTRAC's lawsuit against CBA asserts that, in total, A$17.7 million was deposited at the bank from February to August 2015 on behalf of a company identified in the earlier criminal case as CC&B.
"These funds were the proceeds of a drug importation syndicate and were proceeds of crime, within the meaning of the Criminal Code Act," AUSTRAC's statement of claim says, referring to CC&B only as Company 1.
These funds were the proceeds of a drug importation syndicate and were proceeds of crime, within the meaning of the Criminal Code Act
Lu, a Chinese national on a business visa, described himself as a "net engineer", according to the police document filed in court. He had no involvement in the meat export industry and earned 60,000 yuan ($9,000) a year in his home country, he told police.
Lu said he met another Chinese man while grocery shopping in the Sydney suburb of Chatswood, where CC&B was based.
"After some chatting, he say, 'can you help me do this please?'," Lu told police, according to the document.
Lu agreed to help "because the man asked him", the police statement said, without elaborating.
He told police he didn't understand the receipts because they were written in English.
Australia's Joint Organised Crime Group charged two CC&B employees with dealing in criminal proceeds about the same time as Lu, in August 2015.
The Australian Federal Police could not immediately provide an update on the two CC&B employees identified as being charged.
The police statement said a third CC&B person, company director Ka Chun Leung, was a "potential co-accused" but has left the country. Efforts by Reuters to contact Ka were unsuccessful.