“We know that the same people who arranged for money to be laundered through casinos were buying real estate and advising others on how to conduct real estate transactions,” the former RCMP deputy commissioner told a press conference on the release of his report last month.
There’s good reason to be concerned that dirty money has wormed its way into B.C. real estate. The Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (Fintrac) found significant deficiencies in anti-money laundering controls at 88 per cent of the real estate entities it examined in the last two years, according to data obtained by Postmedia News.
In a recent poll by Insights West, nearly three quarters of those surveyed (73 per cent) said money laundering was a primary cause of Metro Vancouver’s housing crisis. To put things in perspective, German estimated the amount of money cleaned through B.C. casinos over a 10-year period to be approximately $100 million. The value of real estate transactions in the province over that time is in the order of $1 trillion, said Cameron Muir, chief economist for the B.C. Real Estate Association.
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