'Puffery' or pro sport? Pokie boss seeks $56k payout over collapsed pool player case

Monday, 6 July 2026

Four people - including New Zealand’s two best pool players - were charged over almost $180,000 of grants the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) alleged should never have been paid out.

The charges were withdrawn after one of the pool champs died.

Now another defendant wants the DIA to pay out $56,000 in legal costs, with his lawyer arguing the charges “should never have got out of the gates”.

The case pivoted on text messages obtained by search warrant - and whether the pool champs were professional players, or merely very good amateurs.

Matt Edwards and Molrudee Kaisamchaiyanan were New Zealand’s two best pool players, and thanks to a series of gaming grants, they travelled the world to elite tournaments in places like Shanghai and Las Vegas - even if they didn’t win much money.

The Department of Internal Affairs believed that the travel by the multiple National and Oceania champions breached strict rules on pokie money going to professional sport and laid criminal charges - only to withdraw them “in the public interest” when Kaisamchaiyanan died.

Now, nearly three years on from that collapsed prosecution, and nearly four since Kaisamchaiyanan’s death, one of the other defendants in the case - influential pokie industry figure Jinsheng ‘Jackson’ Rao - wants the DIA to pay his legal bill, going to the Auckland District Court to ask for the department to cough up $56,000.

At the heart of the case were text messages obtained by search warrant in which the pool players discussed how they believed an associate of Rao’s - publican Andy Tong - could help secure them the grant money.

Pokie trust Dragon eventually granted some $178,000 to a sports organisation to help fund 18 overseas trips - and Tong (who was never charged with any offending, and had denied receiving favours from Rao or being able to influence grants) went along on 10 of those as a manager. The DIA alleged those 18 grants broke the rules around funding professional sport.

Rao himself only faced one charge related to those grants. All four defendants (a sports official with name suppression was also charged) had pleaded not guilty, and elected trial by jury before the Crown applied to the court to dismiss all charges in September 2023.

But Rao’s lawyer, Honor Lanham KC, told judge Simon Lance that in her view, the DIA’s case was “negligent or incompetent” in its evidence gathering and the department simply didn’t have enough to charge any of the quartet.

Lanham said that while Kaisamchayan and Edwards had “self-styled themselves” as professional pool players in advertising for their business (the name of which is suppressed), the “reality was the facts simply did not bear out whatever that puffery … really was”. Kaisemchayan had earned $1300 in prize money in a 42-month period, Edwards made $6,216 in the same time and their rankings peaked at 489th and 223rd in the world respectively. While they were given grants for travel and accommodation, their other costs far exceeded their winnings.

Lanham said the original complaint had come from another pool organisation - Masse - which also used pokie grants to send its players overseas. And the World Pool Association had said they never considered the pair to be professionals.

“Two people boasting they were professionals and winning a meagre amount of money … my submission is the Crown was never going to get out of the gate on the principal charges,” Lanham said.

Crown lawyer Danielle Houghton said the DIA had a different interpretation of what professionalism meant. Their guidance was clear: only “entirely amateur” competitions where winners received only a trophy or small prize should be funded - and Dragon’s own funding rules restated that. For example, she said, one tournament the pair attended in Shanghai had a $US373,000 prize pool: they were there to compete, and there was no suggestion if they’d won they would return that money.

Houghton said the defendants’ self-description “doesn’t read as puffery but a serious statement … the prize money was well beyond anything available in amateur sports, they were playing against the world’s best players and they were ranked internationally.'

When it came to the grants themselves, Lanham said Rao had no role in deciding who got them, only in administering them and checking they complied with the rules. She said the Crown couldn’t prove Rao knew the grants broke the rules and had no evidence he did. “The problem is they had to prove my client knew … they were professional players and thus [the grants] were not authorised.”

Houghton said the Crown case was Rao either knew the applications didn’t comply “or was wilfully blind to it”; that his job “was to check they were compliant, and a cursory examination” would have found they were not. She said Rao acknowledged in an interview with the DIA that he oversaw compliance, he knew Tong, and attending a tournament with prize money in the “tens of thousands” would not be authorised.

Lanham said the “high point” of the Crown’s case were the texts, obtained by search warrant, which were exchanged between the pool players, the man with suppression and Tong (who was never charged with any offending).

But she said Rao never received any of the texts, wasn’t party to them, and yet the Crown believed that would be enough to charge and convict him. She also argued the texts would have been ruled inadmissible.

Lanham characterised most of the texts as “innocent” examples of Tong chasing up the funding before trips.

Houghton saw the texts very differently. She said they showed Rao was in contact with Tong about the grants, and the “Crown would be saying ultimately there is no reason for these backdoor conversations … the Crown would be inviting the jury to infer these backdoor messages were to ensure grants go through and are passed on to Dragon as compliant”.

Among the messages were comments such as “there would be no funding at all if it wasn’t for this connection” and “it sounds a bit of a rort of the system” and “this is how it may look to someone outside looking in” and in apparent reference to Tong’s inclusion on the trips “it’s a good way to give back to Andy for helping us acquire the funds”. There were also messages from Tong apparently relaying news from Rao about the success and timing of grants.

“It’s very clear they knew the funding was as a favour for Andy,” Houghton said. “They say ‘nothing is free’.”

Houghton said Tong was interviewed and firmly denied that Rao ever did him any favours or could get him grants but he did communicate with Rao about how grants were progressing. She noted Tong moved his pub’s gaming machines to another pokie trust to which Rao’s company Dawn provided management services.

Houghton said she accepted the defendants would have mounted a “very robust defence at trial, but this isn’t a case where the crown lacked evidence to proceed”.

When the charges were dropped, Edwards gave a statement to Stuff saying the charges were widely known in the pool community but had always expected to be acquitted, saying: “I am innocent of the things I have been charged with … I’m glad that I have finally been cleared of any wrongdoing. I look forward to moving on with my life and continuing to represent New Zealand on the world stage in the sport that I love.” He added that “sadly, Molrudee is no longer here to defend herself against the charges and adverse publication”.

When the charges were first laid, Rao gave a statement to Stuff saying the grants had met DIA guidelines and said the department would have to prove the pair were professionals, that he knew they were, and had failed to alert Dragon.

Judge Lance set a nominal date of September 3 to deliver his decision.