The simplest laundering scheme is two equal and opposite bets. In roulette something like odd/even, red/black with the house taking 1/37th (2.7%) or 2/38ths (5.26%) on 0 or double 0 tables, as their vig.
Anyone watching the game for ten minutes would see what was going on but for years Canadian drug entrepreneurs would bring duffel bags of currency into British Columbia's casinos and wash wash wash, scrub scrub scrub. When that became too ridiculously obvious and limited by the amount of currency one could heft, they switched to real estate. But as noted exiting August's "Canadian Condo Crash":
I wonder where all the drug money went? Canada used to be swimming in the stuff, from the B.C. bud crowd in Vancouver to the Fentanyl cowboys across the plains to Toronto to the old skool Mafias in Ottawa and Montreal. See for example "The Montreal Mafia Murders: Blood, Gore, Cannolis, and Hockey Bags" or at Sky News: "Mafia in Canada: How the ’Ndrangheta built a Toronto empire".
So, as the poet said: "The dogs bark but the caravan moves on" and here we are, at Middle East Forum, October 19:
Add Turkey to Financial Action Task Force Blacklist for Northern Cyprus Laundering
Turkish Cypriot Casinos Have Doubled in Number and Become Engines for Money Laundering with No Real Oversight
Conceived by the G7 at the end of the Cold War, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is the international body most engaged in setting standards to combat money laundering and terror finance, and counter proliferation finance. It assesses each country’s systems and involvement in these activities, places offenders on either a grey or black list, depending upon the severity of their actions, and then works with their governments to remove them when they reform. The grey list imposes increased monitoring, and the black list dissuades FATF members from financial dealings with “countries or jurisdictions with serious strategic deficiencies to counter money laundering, terrorist financing, and financing of proliferation.”
At present, there are three blacklisted countries: Iran, Myanmar, and North Korea. Two dozen others are on the grey list, including countries like Nigeria, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Lebanon known for their corruption; states like Yemen, Cameroon, and known for their dysfunction; and countries and territories like Monaco and the British Virgin Islands, whose banks and shell companies are famous for their complicity in sheltering and obfuscating the origins of investor cash.
The self-styled Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is, by design, an entity that stands outside the law. Like other unrecognized states—Russian puppets Abkhazia and Transnistria, for example—northern Cyprus has become a hub for money laundering and other illicit activity. While Transparency International ranks Cyprus as cleaner than Italy, Spain, and Romania, the Turkish-occupied zone is a sector where criminality thrives—and deliberately so.
In recent years, the casino industry has thrived in northern Cyprus. Big-name outlets that invest in the United States, Europe, and Macao and submit to basic regulation and transparency avoid northern Cyprus. About two million tourists visit northern Cyprus each year, almost 80 percent of whom come from Turkey explicitly to take advantage of its beaches and unregulated economy. So do Russians and Iranians. Some Brits and Germans also take advantage of cheap deals and the unregulated economy. In contrast, unoccupied Cyprus welcomes around four million tourists, one-third of whom are British; most of the rest are European or Israelis.
As Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s stewardship of the Turkish economy decimated the Turkish lira, Ankara turned to northern Cyprus as a means to raise capital, much as the Assad regime once used Lebanon to smuggle and launder money. Northern Cyprus is now doubling its thirty-two casinos to sixty-four, all in a region with a population of less than one-half million. Because Turkey rejects European Union anti-money laundering regulations, Turkish Cypriot casinos become engines for laundering with no oversight, absent, perhaps, informal monitoring by the Turkish intelligence service, which sees the region’s casinos as an engine to fund off-books operations.
Erdoğan’s regime is sensitive to inquiries about or focus upon the finances of Turkey-occupied Cyprus. In February 2022, gunmen assassinated Turkish Cypriot businessman Halil Faylali, the alleged godfather of the Turkish Cypriot gambling industry. Shortly after Cemil Önal, Faylali’s finance director, told an anti-corruption watchdog that the northern Cypriot casinos raked in $80 million per month, a gunman assassinated him on a street in The Hague. He allegedly had tapes implicating Erdoğan, intelligence chief-turned-foreign minister Hakan Fidan, and several other Turkish and Turkish Cypriot politicians in various corruption and money laundering schemes....
....MUCH MORE
