Exploring The disturbing question of why Canada's
done so little to end money laundering
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The Money
6 x 1 Hour True Crime
Over six complex, deep dive hours, this series reveals Canada's kingdom of money laundering through big characters, big deals, big fish that got away, whistleblowers, leading experts working to get heard, and a new canadian commission report with 200 witnesses who all point the finger at the police, at the banks,
at the government, and at us.
We've known for years Canada had a money-laundering problem. Why haven't we fixed it?
Canada’s financial intelligence agency, the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC), recently revealed to lawmakers that more than two-thirds of Canadian banks that it looked into had “significant levels” of noncompliance when it comes to anti-money laundering (AML) rules.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police estimated in 2011, which is the most recent year for available data, that between $5 billion and $15 billion CAD ($3.8 billion to $11.5 billion USD) is laundered in the country every year. They are purposfully understating the problem by miscalculating the available data.
canada - the world's capital of money laundering
“Canada must immediately take action in order to change the perception that it welcomes, or even encourages, corrupt behavior,” said Marc Tassé, head of the University of Ottawa’s Canadian Centre of Excellence for Anti-Corruption, to a parliamentary committee.
While the country's finance ministry said it takes the fight against money laundering seriously, Canada logs few money laundering convictions compared with other countries. From 2000 to 2016, Canada had convictions in 316 money laundering cases, according to Statistics Canada. Compare that to the U.K., where prosecutors recorded more than 1,400 money laundering convictions last year alone.
Critics of the way Canada handles money laundering say several factors interfere with the country's attempts to pursue criminal charges, including strict privacy laws that make it difficult to obtain warrants, a reluctance to prosecute and the failure of some banks to report suspicious transactions.
There is a principle of financial investigation so old that it's often used in its original Latin: Cui bono?
The question of who benefits, as the term translates, implies that, if you are trying to solve any crime — particularly one involving money — you must look for who stood to profit.
Spoiler... it's the government... and our banks, the bigges tin the world.
Despite commendable investigative work in B.C. lately on money laundering, experts say the fact that it has been a problem in Canada is an old, open secret.
As someone tweeted following a story on the C.D. Howe report by Transparency International's Kevin Comeau, Canadian money laundering was not exactly "new news."
"All available evidence suggests that international drug barons view Canada as a safe place to launder their illegal cash," said a Maclean's magazine story cited in the tweet. "In fact, DEA agents laughingly refer to Canada as the 'Maytag' of the money-laundering industry."
Margaret Beare, author of the 2007 book Money Laundering in Canada: The Chasing of Dirty and Dangerous Dollars, says things have only gotten worse in the last 15 years
"We still have the exception of lawyers from mandatory reporting and they still can take fees from dirty money," adds Beare, a professor at York University's Osgoode Hall law faculty.
For governments, one of the political difficulties of deciding to crack down is that the inflow of money — estimated in the recent report by Maureen Maloney using the gravity model at about $50 billion a year nationally — boosts many of the things governments like to boost.
In June 2022 The Cullen Report openned a window into
the world of money laundering in canada.
This Commission was established in the wake of signifcant public concern about money laundering in British Columbia. The public was rightfully disturbed by the prospect of criminals laundering their cash and parking their illicit proceeds in this province. I was given a broad mandate to inquire into and report on money laundering in British Columbia, including:
• the extent, growth, evolution, and methods of money laundering in various sectors of the economy;
• the acts or omissions of responsible regulatory agencies and individuals that contributed to money laundering in the province;
• the efectiveness of the anti–money laundering eforts by these agencies and individuals; and
• barriers to efective law enforcement.
The Commission embarked on a process of extensive study
and investigation culminating in the Commission’s public hearings, where I heard testimony from 199 witnesses
over 133 hearing days and received over 1,000 exhibits.
What they discovered was shocking, Canada-wide, coast to coast, and complicated. Too complicated for the mainstream media to translate to Canadaians who consistently believe that our country is too innocent and too much of a backwater for money-laundering to be a real thing.
This factual true crime series follows the money
and reveals the complicated and uncomfortable truth
about money laundering and how canada, all of us
profit from the poverty, suffering, drug addictions
and wars of the world.
Dirty money is here. Like an invisible virus that slowly infects its host, money laundering schemes have been silently corrupting the world’s most esteemed institutions and seemingly safe cities for decades… until now. Over the last few years, the extent of the money laundering rot has been revealed. Newspaper headlines have sounded the alarm, drawing clear connections between dirty money from overseas and the housing crises in major modern cities. Globally, $2 trillion USD is laundered every year — equivalent to 5% of global GDP. But the epicentre of the global racket is a place known better for its idyllic natural beauty and friendly people. In this 4k 1-hour special, we join Canada’s most formidable financial crime experts who are waging a legal and technological war against the criminal architects who are masterminding the world’s most impenetrable money laundering operations. From convoluted cryptocurrency cases to sneaky private lenders, criminal mega-empires to ‘mom and pop’ style schemes, this documentary-special will unearth the tangled root causes of Canada’s cash crisis.
CLEAN COUNTRY, DIRTY MONEY
It was a hot summer afternoon during tourist season on the Halifax waterfront. Cruise and container ships came and went in the busy harbour. All kinds of people come and go during tourist season, but when police were tipped off about a handsome young couple with dive gear near the restricted dock space around Halifax’s famous Pier 21, they escalated the investigation federally and brought in the RCMP major crimes division, port police, and border services. Covert navy divers were deployed to explore a large international container ship near where the couple were spotted. Hidden within a multi-layered maze of compartments deep inside the ship’s hull was a mound of stashed cocaine totalling more than 120kg. When the couple were captured at a local luxury hotel with a mountain of cash, a complex scheme of money laundering, stooges, international drug dealing, and notorious gangs began to unravel. Authorities believed the case was a slam dunk. They caught the high rolling crew red handed. So why then — not even a month later — was the case totally abandoned in court, with no clear explanation given?
Stories like these are rampant in the war against dirty money. Like a rot that slowly and silently corrodes, the mechanisms of money laundering are hidden behind a labyrinth of shady transactions often so complex that entire police task forces fail to adequately expose them after years of tireless work.
Money laundering is the bread and butter of seedy syndicates and criminal empires, but the convoluted cash con starts out as something simple. Imagine a local cash business like a pizza shop. Criminal money is mixed in with the revenue from pizza sales. Instead of saying you had 50 customers on Friday night you say you had 100, and you add the dirty money to the pot which gets declared as legal income to the government. Since your customers pay in cash, and what you’re selling is perishable pizza, there's no good way to trace it. The process is slow, but after a couple of years laundering the money, you use what appears to be a ‘legal’ cash lump sum to put a down payment on a house or commercial lot. The landowner then gets politicians to change zoning rules, build roads, or add other infrastructure to multiply the value of the property many times over, at which point it’s flipped to a developer for a new upscale real estate development. Even the government gets in on the act with tax breaks, infrastructure bonuses, and even cash payments if the developer promises things like affordable housing.Contractors bill the developer huge sums for construction work, some completed, some not. The contractors, often relatives, get the laundered money plus the mortgage money. The money is then ‘stored’ in almost any form: luxury homes, cars, yachts, bars, restaurants, art — almost any material thing. Once the construction project is complete the process is repeated using money from the next project to make payments on the previous mortgage — a kind of Halley’s Comet of debt and an ever increasing stream of wealth back to the people who started the scheme: drug cartels, radical groups like Hezbollah, criminal gangs, and thieves. It happens more than honest people could ever imagine. Over the course of years and decades, houses become apartment blocks, apartment blocks become entire neighbourhoods, and entire neighbourhoods become large swaths of whole cities. The criminal’s empire continues to snowball in size, and the transition from dirty to clean money becomes increasingly complex and much more difficult to uncover.
Follow the money
4K 6 x 1HOUR TRUE CRIME SERIES
THE WAR ON MONEY LAUNDERING
Money laundering is a big global business, and the criminals masterminding these elaborate cash scams must face off against a hard-hitting anti-money laundering army that’s comprised of detectives, criminology experts, and secret operatives who are working at every level.
On the Canadian side we have FINTRAC, a formidable financial intelligence unit that boldly brings together old world detective tactics with bleeding-edge technological tools to take on Canada’s most notorious criminal finance networks. Key players from the task force include former intelligence officer Matt McGuire. McGuire’s offbeat sense of style — which often includes a tweed jacket and a striking pair of neon blue glasses — betrays the sharp intellect and fierce economic expertise that has folded some of Canada’s most airtight dirty money operations. FINTRAC also collaborates closely with the world’s leading criminology and forensic experts to better understand the enemy and anticipate its next move. Professors like Dr. Stephen Schneider — an authority on criminology from Halifax, Nova Scotia —who has spent the last three decades studying and compiling the innermost secrets of Canada’s most dangerous money laundering cases and criminal syndicates. Earlier this year he served as a key expert witness in one of B.C’s notoriously tough to crack cases.
On the American side, there’s Project Cassandra — a strategic anti-money laundering armament that was designed to undercut Hezbollah’s global finance network. The secret agency used wire taps, undercover operations, and covert informants to track cocaine shipments and dirty money from Latin America, West Africa, and the Middle East. The agency was shut down in 2007, but under Trump, there are murmurings that the taskforce will be revived.
In this one hour special, we will be given never-before-seen access into the covert world of money laundering counterintelligence and follow financial trails to uncover the legal and technological tools that are being used in the fight against dirty money. Expert characters will feature prominently — they will not only provide important and interesting takeaway facts, but they will demystify this complex world and bring it down to earth for viewers to understand and enjoy.
CANADA’S CASH CRISIS
So why is Canada at the epicentre of the global money laundering web? The key to the question is found in the idyllic coastal mountain city of Victoria, B.C. In the last few decades, Victoria has become a degraded haven for illicit capital flight and dirty money, attracting a swarm of criminal organizations with links to China, Mexico, and Iran.
Why Victoria? If you’re in the Pacific Rim and you’ve got a pile of dirty cash to launder, there’s no place better. The city has a large international airport with flights from several Asian cities and a big international port for container shipping across the Pacific Rim. It’s also close to the Canada-U.S. border and has easy access to Mexico and a host of international banks. The city has a bustling tech industry with expertise on encryption and crypto currency. And the illicit cherry on top of this criminal ice cream sundae is that If you run into trouble along the way, Canada’s criminal justice system is among the most lenient in the world. Pre-trial disclosure requirements tend to bring complex laundering cases to a grinding halt.
In the last few years, Canadian citizens and local governments have pushed back hard to fight against dirty money. Earlier this year, Canadian authorities completed a gruelling four-year investigation — the largest money laundering charges ever laid in Canada. The case dubbed ‘E-Pirate’ got inside one of the most sophisticated money laundering operations ever discovered. Just as the investigation and charges were coming to trial, the top team was unexpectedly replaced by a new less experienced one. Like in the Halifax cocaine diving case, the entire prosecution crumbled. Every single charge was dropped and every one of the accused got off. To this day, no explanation has been given as to why it was done or what exactly went wrong.
Although the capital of global money laundering is Canada, dirty money relies on a global flow of cash and crime. From mega metropolises in the middle east, to quaint fishing towns in Japan, dirty money affects the shape of your skyline, the price of your rent, and the ability for legitimate local businesses to survive in your communities, not to mention the crime from drug trafficking and prostitution that money laundering thrives off of. By using Canada as our primary case study through which this global issue is explored, this series will use suspenseful storytelling and larger than life characters to expose dirty money’s concealed yet completely corrupting influence.
6 x 1 hour True Crime Factual Series
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