B.C. needs new, dedicated unit to successfully solve ‘staggering’ money laundering problem: report

Politicians ‘could have done more’ to stop problem, but commissioner says no evidence corruption was motivator. The commissioner of British Columbia’s public inquiry into money laundering said the federal anti-money laundering regime is not effective and the province needs to go its own way if it hopes to tackle the problem of dirty money washing through its economy. In a final report released Wednesday, Supreme Court Justice Austin Cullen said the province needs to establish a dedicated provincial money laundering intelligence and investigation unit and appoint a commissioner to oversee the government’s approach to the problem. Speaking to reporters immediately after the release of his report, Cullen said the public was right to be suspicious about the lack of response to what appeared to be a huge amount of dirty money flowing into B.C. “For too long, money laundering has been kept on the sidelines,” he said. “It’s time for that to change.” Cullen said the agency tasked by the federal government to identify money laundering threats — the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre, or FINTRAC — is “ineffective” and that B.C. needs to strike out on its own to make progress. ”If the province is to achieve success in the fight against money laundering, it must develop its own intelligence capacity in order to better identify money laundering threats,” Cullen said in his report, which is more than 1,800 pages long. ullen’s report contains a total of 101 recommendations covering areas from law enforcement to real estate and banking regulations.The proposed anti-money laundering commissioner would be a new, provincially established agency responsible for tracking how
Cullen’s recommendations are put in place…
Source: cbc.ca/ news