Ottawa Citizen | Money laundering is pervasive, but little is done about it: experts
In the below article from Ottawa Citizen, over the past 10 years, Ottawa-area banks flagged more than 10,000 suspicious transactions to Canada’s financial intelligence agency, but during that same period only 20 people faced money laundering-related charges in the city.
The disparity between those numbers reflects the challenges of cracking down on money laundering and the flow of illegal funds in Canada, experts say.
The data, which is publicly available, shows that, beginning in 2011, banks in the Ottawa area were signalling several dozen reports of suspicious activity to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, or FINTRAC, every month. But those numbers have risen recently, beginning to number in the hundreds each month in 2019 and 2020.
Suspicious transaction reports are, according to FINTRAC, financial transactions for which there are reasonable grounds to believe they may be linked to money laundering or terrorist financing. A spike in their number is not necessarily indicative of a rise in the amount of money laundering taking place; FINTRAC said in a statement to this newspaper that such reports are on the rise across Canada because the agency has been pushing to have businesses recognize the signs of suspicious transactions and report them......
Money laundering is pervasive, but little is done about it: Experts | Ottawa Citizen
