The just-released 1,800 page report of the Cullen Commission, which investigated money laundering in British Columbia, is scathingly critical of the British Columbia Lottery Corporation and several high-level former government ministers. It says they didn’t do enough to prevent money laundering on a grand scale from occurring on their watches.
The report derived from 133 days of hearings and 199 witnesses heard by the special commission chaired by Supreme Court Justice Austin Cullen, which completed its work earlier this year.
Cullen wrote: “In 2014 alone, British Columbia casinos accepted nearly $1.2 billion in cash transactions of $10,000 or more, including 1,881 individual cash buy-ins of $100,000 or more – an average of more than five per day.”
Cullen found it particularly galling that the laundered money bore very obvious characteristics.
He wrote, “It often consisted predominantly of $20 bills, oriented in a non-uniform fashion, bundled in ‘bricks’ of specific values (as opposed to number of notes), bound with elastic bands, and carried in shopping bags, knapsacks, suitcases, gym bags, cardboard boxes, and all manner of other receptacles.”
The money was often delivered to casino patrons within sight of casinos in the dead of night by unmarked luxury cars. Cullen wrote, “It should have been apparent to anyone with an awareness of the size and character of these transactions that Lower Mainland casinos were accepting vast quantities of proceeds of crime during this time period.”
The report held up BCLC for special opprobrium, for ignoring frequent warnings from law enforcement until 2015. “BCLC resisted these calls for action and continued to allow these transactions, almost without exception,” it said.
Compliance managers and corporate security essentially stood by while large cash transactions took place. Hundreds of millions of dollars that originated from Chinese nationals and international crime syndicates went through the casinos.
Cullen also verbally lashed former British Columbia premier Christy Clark, and the provincial minister in charge of gaming at the time, Rich Coleman. He wrote, “Coleman was aware of the concerns….that the province’s casinos were being used to launder the proceeds of crime. At the same time, Mr. Coleman also received information from BCLC stating that the province’s gaming industry had a strong and effective anti–money laundering regime.”
Coleman ordered an independent review of anti-money laundering in the gaming industry, then took no action against the suspicious cash transactions.
In possession of the information, Clark didn’t do anything to determine if the casinos were in fact the ultimate destination for the cash, said the report.
The report also chronicled the use of luxury automobiles and the purchase of high end real estate to launder money.
Apparently willing to call this lack of action incompetence or negligence, Cullen declined to call it corrupt: “There is no evidence that any of these individuals knowingly encouraged, facilitated, or permitted money laundering to occur in order to obtain personal benefit or advantage, be it financial, political, or otherwise.”
The Cullen report includes 101 recommendations, lowering the threshold for questioning proof of the origin of funds down to $3,000 and appointing a commissioner whose remit would be fighting money-laundering.
