A joint report from three Australian news organizations indicates that up to AU$1 billion is being laundered through the country’s pokie machines every year.
The report was published by The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes, the same group that discovered evidence of money laundering at Crown casinos, and then gaming halls run by its chief rival, Star Entertainment.
According to Inside Asian Gaming, the latest expose shows evidence of a money laundering syndicate operating “with impunity” out of pubs and clubs in New South Wales (NSW) and Queensland. In Sydney alone, some 140 pubs and clubs were identified as venues of interest, with chief NSW gaming investigator David Byrne noting, “That’s only in the Sydney metro area, that’s not the entire NSW landscape.”
Details of the report were broadcast on national television and online. They included closed-camera TV footage from a Sydney pub showing syndicate members working at multiple machines to launder money, with no intervention from staff.
In the footage, one person inserted AU$27,000 into two machines, then bet a single dollar on each before withdrawing printed tickets and redeeming the “winnings.”
The report said the information is now in the hands of state and federal authorities, and suggests “easily in the hundreds of millions” of dollars is laundered in the state and more than AU$1 billion nationally.
The report also alleged that efforts to address the issue have been stymied by ClubsNSW and the Australian Hotels Association.
“The challenge has always been finding the resources and time and budget to address” money laundering in smaller venues, Byrne said. The NSW government will take in an estimated AU$2.8 billion in gaming taxes in 2021, almost half of that from pokies.
Investigation from state and federal agencies suggest that pubs and clubs have been under reporting suspected money laundering, with only 5.5 percent of venues having submitted a suspicious transaction report since January 2018.
