Tracking dirty money, show me the laundered money

As millions of dollars come into the housing market. Governments are finding it hard to track even legitimate foreign purchasers when making rules to cool the housing market, but when the money is laundered the murkiness is by design.

And one of the biggest impediments in tracking the flow, according to many critics of our current regime, is lawyers. “Lawyers, they’re the biggest problem with money laundering in this country,” Kim Marsh, the former head of the RCMP’s International Organized Crime Investigation Unit.

Similarly in “Tracking dirty money”,

An evaluation by the international Financial Action Task Force in 2016 identified the absence of lawyers and Quebec notaries as a “significant loophole” in Canada’s anti-money-laundering monitoring system.

The problem is further complicated with a 2015 judgment of the Supreme Court. It ended a 14-year-long legal saga between the federal government and Canada’s law societies when it ruled that making lawyers subject to Canada’s money-laundering and terrorist-financing act risked violating solicitor-client privilege.

Meaning?

It simply means efforts to track dirty money is being hampred by our legal system itself. The law needs to change so that the so called “solicitor-client privilege” be made an non-issue when it comes to matters of public interest. As it is now, the law is outdated as clearly demonstrated above – The lawyers themselves are impeding efforts track dirty money.

Canada’s Criminal Code defines a money launderer as anyone who “uses, transfers the possession of, sends or delivers to any person or place, transports, transmits, alters, disposes of or otherwise deals with, in any manner and by any means, any property or any proceeds of any property with intent to conceal or convert that property or those proceeds, knowing or believing that all or a part of that property or of those proceeds was obtained or derived directly or indirectly as a result of a) the commission in Canada of a designated offence or b) an act or omission anywhere that, if it had occurred in Canada, would have constituted a designated offence.”

But lawyers insist only transactions involving physical cash qualify as money laundering.

“Money laundering, to me, is taking illicit cash, putting it through some accounts so you can get clean money in a bank account. It starts with cash,” said Herman Van Ommen, president of the Law Society of British.

Beautiful great room in Vancouver, Canada. The unique decorative wall adds texture and pattern … Made possible with dirty money?

Reference: –

What is money laundering?

Money laundering is the process used to disguise the source of money or assets derived from criminal activity. Profit-motivated crimes span a variety of illegal activities from drug trafficking and smuggling to fraud, extortion and corruption. The scope of criminal proceeds is significant – estimated at some $590 billion to $1.5 trillion (U.S.) worldwide each year.

Money laundering facilitates corruption and can destabilize the economies of susceptible countries. It also compromises the integrity of legitimate financial systems and institutions, and gives organized crime the funds it needs to conduct further criminal activities. It is a global problem, and the techniques used are numerous and can be very sophisticated. Technological advances in e-commerce, the global diversification of financial markets and new financial product developments provide further opportunities to launder illegal profit and obscure the money trail leading back to the underlying crime.

While the techniques for laundering funds vary considerably and are often highly intricate, there are generally three stages in the process:

• Placement: involves placing the proceeds of crime in the financial system;
• Layering: involves converting the proceeds of crime into another form and creating complex layers of financial transactions to disguise the audit trail and the source and ownership of funds (e.g., the buying and selling of stocks, commodities or property); and,
• Integration: involves placing the laundered proceeds back in the economy under a veil of legitimacy.

FINTRAC’s financial intelligence plays a critical role in helping to combat money laundering. This financial intelligence is used to assist money laundering and terrorist financing investigations in the context of a wider variety of criminal investigations, where the origins of the suspected criminal proceeds are linked to drug trafficking, fraud, tax evasion, corruption, and other criminal offences. With these types of crimes, there are victims, there is often violence, and there is real social harm.