“Clients were entitled to expect you were licensed, and you weren’t,” he said.
The Ministry of Health launched an investigation after it was tipped off to Li’s illegitimate operation in October 2023. He appeared to mainly serve the Chinese community, with patients referred to him through word-of-mouth.
A data analyst for the government agency who was fluent in Mandarin was recruited to call the clinic posing as a potential customer.
“This is Dr Li speaking,” the defendant said when he answered his cellphone.
A week later, the employee showed up for an appointment accompanied by a man who, unbeknownst to the defendant, was a health protection officer for the government agency.
They were escorted to a moderate-sized room within the home that was used as both the waiting room and the treatment area, court documents state. They sat on a couch, about two metres from the dental chair where Li was attending to another patient.
The pair left after about 10 minutes, telling the woman who had escorted them inside that it didn’t look like a proper clinic.
The search warrant, executed seven months after the initial tip, helped authorities to recover a handheld X-ray machine and handwritten notebooks recording more than 300 appointments dating as far back as a year.
But Li openly admitted he had been practising dentistry for three years. He had never applied to the Dental Council to become a registered oral health practitioner.
“When spoken to by police, Mr Li stated … that he saw around 20 patients per week,” court documents state. “He said he had performed a root canal the previous week and does approximately one every week or fortnightly, and does one or two fillings per week on average.”
All of his patients were aware he wasn’t registered, he said, adding that he got all the necessary drugs for the procedures mailed to him from China.
In an interview with a probation officer before his sentencing, Li explained that he had operated a dental clinic in China prior to immigrating to New Zealand in 2010 to be with family.
Unable to pass the English proficiency exam needed to gain a dental licence here, he instead worked as a cleaner, he said. Li said he initially got into dentistry again as a favour to a friend, but the practice grew under the advice of others in the Chinese community, and by the time of the raid, the underground clinic was his main income.
Judge Glubb said the magnitude and the sophistication of the offending was significant, as was the planning and premeditation.
“That included obtaining a dental chair,” he said, noting that without professional oversight “there’s a risk of real harm”.
He described the makeshift clinic as “substandard” and with “inadequate facilities”.
Li pleaded guilty to 14 charges, including a representative charge of criminal nuisance punishable by up to one year’s imprisonment. He also faced fines of up to $10,000 for claiming to be a health practitioner while unqualified, up to $30,000 for performing a restricted activity without being a health practitioner, and up to $100,000 for possessing and using a radiation source without a licence.
The $45,000 fine settled on by the judge factored in a 25% reduction for Li’s guilty pleas and 5% for his previous good character.
A sentencing hearing last year had been postponed after defence lawyer Michael Kan suggested his client might need a reduced fine because he didn’t have the financial capacity to pay. But since then, the judge noted, no forensic accounting documents had been put before the court that would suggest that to be the case.
Li was ordered to pay the full amount.
“I remind you, you can’t practise as a dentist moving forward without appropriate qualifications,” Judge Glubb said as the hearing came to a close.
The defendant, wearing a facemask, as he has for all other hearings attended by the media, waited for a court-appointed Mandarin interpreter to translate the statement. He nodded in response.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
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