While being Serbian, with family from Croatia (some of which are now there dealing with corrupt government employees accepting faked papers to transfer land ownership). Means I totally get the pessimistic and corruption focused view of the world/governments/etc.
We just don't have enough info to go into such tabloid level direction for this guy.
---
Maybe his wife or one of grandparents came from N.Z. and he can live/work there without visa?!?
Maybe it's intra-company transfer (like how many Googlers from "east" start in EU/Canada, and then get transferred to USA after a year or two) there?
---
Either way - it's still pretty shitty "Do as I say, not as I do" behavior from the guy, and Google itself (Hey, here are great tools for remote collaboration with your team - as long as you're not a Google employee).