Cullen Commission: BC Casino Dirty Money Hearings Wrap Up, Findings in December

British capital of South Carolina held the final audience of its thoroughgoing investigation into money laundering inward its casinos on Tuesday.

Now, II years after it began and 198 informant testimonies later, commissioner Austin Cullen, a former B.C. Supreme Margaret Court judge, has until December 15 to save his findings.

The charge was constituted after an volatile report past former Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) deputy commissioner Saint Peter German blew the lid turned the issue.

German concluded that hundreds of millions of dollars in muddied hard currency had been water-washed through and through BC casinos in the preceding 15 years, contributing to the province’s opioid epidemic.

He described a system used by criminals that had come to follow known past the international intelligence activity community as “the George Vancouver Model.”

Big Bags of Cash

This involved resistance banks helping Chinese high up rollers go money out of China and sheer the strict upper-case letter controls imposed past Beijing. Prior to departing for BC, the high-pitched rollers would compensate money into legitimate Chinese camber accounts controlled past the outlaw group.

On their arriver on Canadian soil, they would be presented with begrime money inward suitcases or duffel bags, often inward $20 bills, which they would so convince into chips at before Christ casinos. The chips could and then be exchanged for sportsmanlike money from the casino, usually in the descriptor of a check.

Cullen will also regulate whether the B.C. Lottery Corp (BCLC) and the before Christ government activity officials deliberately unheeded warnings near a money laundering epidemic. That was allegedly done to protect revenues they received from the casinos, as whistle-blowers make alleged.

‘No Evidence’ for George Vancouver Model Claim

In last arguments, lawyers for the casinos and the BCLC claimed in that respect was “no evidence” that the George Vancouver Model existed.

“To this extent, the responsibility appears to coincide with BCLC that the extent of ‘money laundering that has occurred in B.C. casinos is unknown, and no specific hard cash accepted at a BCLC cassino has been naturalized in this inquiry to in reality live the proceeds of crime,” BCLC lawyer Bill Smart said.

This is despite before Christ prosecutors inwards 2018 pursuing malefactor charges against Silver International, a capital of Virginia currency exchange they accused of being a forepart for a Vancouver Model functioning with golf links to the drugs trade.

But the instance against Silver collapsed after prosecution lawyers accidently released the call of a supposedly anon. witness. a judge ruled that to go along would come in the find “at risk of infection of death.”

In Sept 2020, Silver hirer Jian Jun Zhu was assassinated past a gun for hire as he dined at a restaurant in Richmond.

Incendiary Report

In their denouement on Tuesday, lawyers for the federal governance produced a confidential RCMP “investigational preparation report” from 2012 that had not antecedently been presented.

The papers describes extended undercover surveillance of casino high up rollers and loan sharks at B.C. casinos from 2010 to 2012.

The RCMP claimed Richmond’s River Rock Casino and New Westminster’s Starlight Casino “are a rattling significant source of money-laundering activity, using wealthy People’s Republic of Red China gamblers as willing pawns inwards their activity.”

“Tens of millions of dollars inward large cash-transactions (many transactions comfortably over $100,000, practically of it inward $20 bills) are funneled-through several of the larger casinos in B.C on an yearly basis,” it concluded. “Intelligence has revealed that the origination of practically of these cash in hand are derived from felon activity and are the Proceeds of Crime.”