In one case, back in 2014, a tax bill was paid with a big bag containing $47,000. In 2017, city staff accepted a property-tax payment of $44,463, all in cash. Each of the 1,905 payments recorded in the documents exceeded $5,000.There was no rule requiring staff to ask a bag carrier for identification. There was no regulation requiring staff to report any of the weird transactions to anyone.
In another little-noticed story reported only three weeks ago — this one illustrative of the global reputation Canada has earned for itself as an offshore bolthole for dubiously earned and circuitously stashed money — filings in federal court by Fintrac and the Canada Border Services Agency outline a complex operation that appears to have moved more than $80 million from China via Hong Kong to the principals behind a Markham, Ont.
So it’s all very intriguing, but why it matters is that last year the federal Criminal Intelligence Service released what it called a “National Criminal Intelligence Estimate on the Canadian Criminal Marketplace: Money Laundering and Fraud” that reckoned the amount of dirty money making its way into Canadian real estate and other ventures at perhaps $133 billion annually.Article content
In meeting the global threats to democracy posed by belligerent and hostile police states and authoritarian regimes like China and Russia, the world’s democracies are being called on to clean up their own acts. Shutting down big-money boltholes and laundering schemes run by gangsters, kleptocrats and the cronies of the world’s dictators has emerged as central to the summit’s agenda.