Message Board Archives

“In the investigator’s opinion,” Mr. German’s report read, “the matter reached a head in 2012 when the River Rock accepted $100,000 in $20 bills from a patron, who used $3,000 in chips from his pocket to play and then cashed out.” In less time than it takes to run to the store for milk, this guy had cleaned $100,000 in dirty money.

The same guy returned the next day with another $100,000 to launder. And he did. It is now known that no – zero, zilch, nada – transaction was refused by the B.C. Lottery Corp. and its casinos before 2015 despite what was going on. How is that possible?

It’s in those vices that Canada’s reputation has rightly taken a battering in recent years, from revelations about the billions of dollars in drug money laundered through casinos into Vancouver real estate, to nationwide bar association standards that allow lawyers to hide their clients’ shadowy sources of wealth.

It’s no small matter that the CPI measures only public-sector types of corruption: bribery, diversion of public funds, nepotism in the civil service, bureaucrats abusing their authority for private gain, empty-promise whistleblower protection, useless conflict-of-interest laws and so on.

The capacity of government to detect money-laundering practices falls within the CPI’s purview, but one shudders to think what Canada’s score would be if the federal government allowed a degree of public scrutiny sufficient to effectively expose the rackets that move money into Canada on behalf of big-time gangsters, police-state apparatchiks, and oligarchs and kleptocrats from Belarus to Beijing.