Casinos could be dirty money avenue: Asian group

MANILA - Casinos, including those on the Internet, top the list of potential money laundering routes and an upcoming study will investigate how much they are being used to wash dirty money, a regional body said on Thursday.

Real estate, jewellery and dealers in high-value goods such as precious metals and stones were other avenues for dirty money, said the Asia-Pacific Group (APG) on Money Laundering.

“Casinos are not only today the physical buildings that you can walk into and have a bet. There is also Internet betting and Internet casinos,” Michael Keelty, co-chair of the APG and commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, told reporters at the end of a four-day annual meeting in Manila.

“So we are looking at a project on the amount of money that could potentially be laundered through casinos.”

The APG groups 32 countries and jurisdictions committed to implementing laws and measures against dirty money. The regional body follows standards set by the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF).

Keelty said APG continued to monitor and evaluate compliance of its members with more than 40 standards set by the FATF, the global anti-money laundering watchdog.

But different levels of economic development and regulatory frameworks in the region were main stumbling blocks to full compliance, he added.

Elliot Kennedy, head of the APG Secretariat, said without sufficient controls in customer identification, criminal elements may enter a casino and gamble for a few minutes just to cleanse money that originated from drug syndicates.

Alternative remittance systems, cash couriers and the use of non-profit organisations and charities were also being monitored for potential money laundering activities, the APG said.

Detecting new terrorism financing tricks and eliminating them were some of the key challenges in the global fight against dirty money, FATF President Frank Swedlove told Reuters.

“As criminal elements adopt new techniques, we should be able to recommend to countries to alter their regimes,” Swedlove said.

The International Monetary Fund said last week countries must improve monitoring of suspected terror financing and money laundering after it found significant differences in the quality of national and regional banking supervision.

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