THE NEW YORK TIMES: Government officials in the province of British Columbia were aware that suspicious money was entering their revenue stream, but took no steps to stop it.
VANCOUVER — Self-professed students were buying multimillion-dollar homes in the Vancouver area, with dubious sources of income, or none at all.
A family of modest means transferred at least 114 million Canadian dollars to British Columbia.
Loan sharks cleaned their dirty money by giving garbage bags and hockey bags full of illicit Canadian 20 dollar bills to gamblers who took it onto casino floors.
Those were just some of the findings from a long-awaited report into money laundering in Canada’s western province of British Columbia, which after two years of testimony was finally released by a special commission on Wednesday.
Canada is a “major money laundering country,” with weak law enforcement and gaps in its laws, that put it on a list of countries that included Afghanistan, China and Colombia, according to a 2019 report by the State Department.
Few places in Canada launder as much money as the province of British Columbia, specifically the region around Vancouver, which has one of the country’s biggest underground economies. The province has earned an international reputation as a haven for “snow washing” — a term for money laundering in Canada, according to government officials. » | Catherine Porter, Vjosa Isai and Tracy Sherlock | Wednesday, June 15, 2022
