The Commission of Inquiry into Money Laundering, aka the “Cullen Commission” has submitted its final report to British Columbia province officials. The 1,804-page report will now be carefully reviewed before it is released to the public.
The panel met for more than a year, taking testimony from a wide spectrum of officials, including a former British Columbia, Canada premier.
The hearings explored the seamy underbelly of casinos, high end automobiles and real estate and their connection to illegal drugs, transnational organized crime based in Mexico and South America, and bad actors from China and Iran, all of whom are suspected to be profiting from the illegal movement of cash under the radar of law enforcement.
Commission co-lead counsel Brock Martland noted that the commission wasn’t able to look at everything it would have liked to. He told Glacier Media: “If we’d had a five-year or seven-year mandate, we would have explored a lot more corners of the activity that is underway.”
He added, “But I think the inquiry is really driven by the need to cover ground, make decisions, try to report on all the sectors of the economy that are in the mandate, and do our best to be focused on what are the best sort of set of recommendations that we at the commission can give to the provincial government at the end of the day.”
According to Scott McGregor, formerly a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) intelligence officer and analyst for the province’s Gaming Policy and Enforcement, noted that the lion’s share of the commission’s time focused on money laundering at casinos.
This includes Chinese nationals bringing in suitcases filled with cash and converting them with little difficulty. Or drug dealers “laundering” drug profits. He calls this an example of “hybrid warfare,” being conducted by China and Iran and various criminal groups. It is part of an international campaign that includes cyber espionage and misinformation.
The commission heard testimony in March, 2021 from a former RCMP transnational organized crime investigator Calvin Chrustie, who told how money laundering at casinos was linked to transnational organized crime.
Some of the network of gamblers who used B.C. casinos to launder money were associated with the China People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese consul general in Vancouver.
While the commission looked at the regulations that allowed hundreds of millions of dollars to be laundered undetected in the 2010s, it largely ignored the people who were the source of the cash. Said McGregor, “The transnational nature of everything, I think, that’s kind of what’s been lost. You see a couple people saying something about it and they just gloss over it.”
