Michael Snounou once rubbed shoulders with Australia’s most affluent people from his lavish Point Piper and Bellevue Hill homes, while running a thriving chemical business. But his repeated choices to direct his legitimate cleaning chemicals into the hands of meth-makers across the country marked the end of his golden years, which now stand in stark contrast to the prison life he has lived in recent times. Michael Snounou and the view from his former Point Piper home.
Credit: SMH The 47-year-old former chemical company director was sentenced last month to a decade in jail for two counts of possessing chemicals intended for the manufacturing of prohibited drugs. Snounou’s double life – in which he transported chemicals bought by his company Cyndan to cooks of the drug “ice” – has been laid bare in documents newly released by the NSW District Court. In 2009, the Sydney University engineering graduate and alumnus of the prestigious Newington College became a director of Cyndan, which made and sold cleaning products that used iodine, a chemical element also used in methamphetamine recipes.
Throughout much of his five-year secret involvement in the drug game, Snounou lived on Wolseley Road in Point Piper, one of the country’s most expensive streets. Michael Snounou is the former executive director of Cyndan Chemicals. Credit: Cyndan website At one point, 15 buckets of iodine bound for a drug warehouse sat in his luxury SUV overnight, mere metres from then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s house.
A missed deadline for a legitimate consignment of iodine in September 2013 kicked off Snounou’s moonlighting as a meth lab assistant. Cyndan ordered 800 kilograms of iodine from Ruakura Pty Ltd. It came in cylindrical containers weighing 20 kilograms with unique batch numbers and was en route to the company’s Warriewood warehouse on the northern beaches.
Unexpectedly, the Cyndan warehouse manager called Snounou to let him know the delivery would arrive at his house, as it would not make it to the warehouse before its 3pm closure. Snounou faced a maximum life sentence for drug importation charges but those charges were dropped. Snounou took 400 kilograms of iodine from a courier near his then-address at Bellevue Hill and placed it in a Cyndan-branded Toyota RAV4.
He drove it to a mechanic in Marrickville, where he and another man unloaded the containers and put them into a white van. Three days later, another 400 kilograms of iodine ordered by Cyndan were delivered directly to the same Marrickville mechanic and unloaded. A Toyota HiAce then reversed into the garage for a short while.
As it left, police were watching. Those batches of iodine made their way to two ice labs, one in Ourimbah on the Central Coast and another at Jerrys Plains in the Hunter Valley. Police found containers of the chemicals with serial numbers that matched those ordered by Snounou in September.
A third lab in Cattai in north-west Sydney was discovered with 20 kilograms of iodine, which a Cyndan employee confirmed had his handwriting on its label. Cyndan-linked iodine continued to appear mysteriously in ice labs and cars until March 2017, when Snounou swapped numbered containers for unmarked buckets and even occasionally company vehicles for his own personal luxury car in an attempt to avoid police. Several days after a tonne of the chemical arrived at Cyndan’s warehouse, Snounou was seen pouring it into plain buckets and putting them in his Range Rover.
More than a dozen of those buckets stayed in his luxury SUV overnight, parked at his Point Piper home. The buckets were driven to Rhodes and loaded into a white van that was taken to South Granville and put into a truck. Six months later, that truck was carrying 11 kilograms of meth when police stopped its driver on the Southern Tablelands.
Officers spent three days searching a large ice lab nearby in September 2017 and found more buckets of iodine. From 2013-2017, Cyndan ordered $164,000 worth of iodine, which police later traced to drug labs. That was until Snounou’s criminal side hustle finally unravelled.
On February 21, 2018, police swooped on his Point Piper home and arrested him. While he provided massive amounts of iodine to drug manufacturers across several years, he was not involved in actually making the ice. For years, he faced a potential life sentence for separate drug importation charges but those charges were dropped and he did not face a NSW District Court trial.
He pleaded guilty to the two charges of possessing precursors for the manufacture of prohibited drugs. Following a six-year court process, Snounou was sentenced last month to 10 years’ jail with a non-parole period of seven years and six months. He will be eligible for parole on February 21, 2029.
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