Source: ABC News —
As financial sector lobby groups frequently note, the banking industry is highly regulated.
There’s an A-focused alphabet soup of regulators to satisfy – ASIC, APRA, ACCC, AUSTRAC – oversight bodies like AFCA and BCCC, and then pesky journalists writing about when things don’t go well.
That’s a good reason why criminals might avoid dealing with any of them and instead turn to an illegal multi-national “bank” to launder their dirty money around the globe and through investing in Australian real estate.
This is what the Australian Federal Police allege had been going on for years, casting a fresh spotlight on a potential gaping hole in Australia’s anti-money-laundering monitoring — real estate agents, lawyers and accountants, none of whom are obliged to report suspicious transactions.
The sting
This week federal police arrested nine people and seized millions of dollars’ worth of Sydney homes, cryptocurrency and luxury items, crushing a syndicate it is alleging offered money laundering at an “industrial scale”.
The AFP allege the syndicate acted as an unregulated multi-national bank, drawing on cash reserves in multiple countries around the world and facilitating transactions for criminal clients.
Money laundering describes the “washing” of cash so that money made by criminal means ends up looking like legitimate profits.
In this case, the police allege the syndicate used “multiple jurisdictions by multiple means”, including exploiting daigous (essentially, border-hopping shoppers), casino junkets and an informal transfer system outside of conventional banking.
It will be alleged in court the syndicate laundered $150 million in its own profits, gained from the movement of cash between 2018 and 2022.
Aside from a large collection of luxury goods and cars, it parked the allegedly illicit funds in a prized property portfolio, including 20 addresses across Sydney — with two homes in the eastern suburbs worth a combined $19 million alone — and a $47 million block of land near the future Western Sydney Airport.
The regulated
Sometimes criminals do simply use a bank to move their dirty money.
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