Using his luxury SUV instead of a car covered in his company's branding was not enough to help a chemical company's director escape police attention after they suspected he was involved in the drug game.
Michael Snounou, 46, faces a decade in prison when sentenced next year for possessing chemicals used to make prohibited drugs. But he will avoid a trial for separate import charges carrying a potential life sentence after they were dropped on Monday.
Snounou became a director in 2009 of chemical company Cyndan, which produced and sold a sanitiser kit containing iodine, according to court documents seen by AAP.
Iodine also features in recipes for methamphetamine - the drug "ice".
Snounou received 400 kilograms of iodine near his Bellevue Hill home in Sydney's eastern suburbs in September 2013 after learning a delivery bound for Cyndan's Warriewood warehouse on the Northern Beaches would miss a 3pm deadline.
He loaded containers marked with serial numbers linked to his company into a Toyota car bearing its signage and drove the chemicals to an auto electrician's warehouse in Marrickville where he and another man loaded them into a white van.
Three days later another 400kg of iodine arrived, this time sent straight to the warehouse in Sydney's inner west.
Two days before Christmas that year police raided a meth lab at Ourimbah on the NSW Central Coast, finding containers marked with batch numbers linked to Cyndan.
An empty container from the same September delivery was found at another lab at Jerrys Plains in the Hunter Region in January 2014.
A Cyndan employee later identified his own handwriting on a label for 20kg of iodine found at a third lab at Cattai in Sydney's northwest in May 2014.
By December that year, serial numbers had been blacked out on containers found at a Kenthurst lab, but iodine linked to Cyndan continued cropping up alongside meth and other precursors discovered in cars and clandestine labs in January 2015.
Within a week of another tonne of the chemical arriving in March 2017, Snounou had ordered employees to repackage the iodine and move it out of Cyndan's warehouse.
He was earlier seen pouring some of that iodine into unmarked buckets before placing them in his Range Rover.
At least 15 of those buckets remained in his luxury SUV overnight, parked outside multi-million dollar apartments around the corner from the then-prime minister's house in Sydney's Point Piper, before being taken to Rhodes and loaded into a white van.
The van was taken to South Granville, where the buckets were moved into a truck.
About six months later, the driver of that truck was stopped on the Southern Tablelands in a vehicle carrying 11kg of methamphetamine.
More white buckets were found nearby at a "very large clandestine lab" which took police three days to search in September 2017.
Snounou was due to face trial in the NSW District Court but pleaded guilty to two counts of possessing precursors for the manufacture of prohibited drugs.
He is due to be sentenced in February.
