Allison Latimer News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Commissioner Austin Cullen has not heard any explicit admission or allegation of corruption from officials who have testified. However, Cullen has heard testimony that shows regulatory failures and ineffective policy and law enforcement, as a result of alleged wilful ignorance, miscommunication and slow-moving bureaucratic responses. Cullen is expected to draw his own conclusions and determine facts in his final report sometime this year. His mandate is to determine “the extent, growth, evolution and methods of money laundering” in six sectors of the economy, including gambling. Cullen...

But River Rock’s long-time VIP/high-limit gambling architect Walter Soo previously told the commission he was observing “geopolitical” factors in and around 2012 that could lead more wealthy Chinese gamblers to Vancouver. These included a U.S. crackdown on money laundering in Macau-connected Las Vegas casinos, Chinese president Xi Jinping’s 2013 anti-corruption/political purge campaign, China’s capital flight restrictions and Canada’s investor immigrant program targeting China’s elites. Commission counsel Kyle McCleery read a Great Canadian Gaming Corp. (GCGC) report from Soo ...

Where did the buck stop? Or, rather, where did the duffel bags stuffed with $20 bills – suspected to be from Vancouver’s deadly, illicit opioid trade – stop? That’s the constant question circling over the public inquiry into money laundering in B.C. during recent testimony from four key executives from the B.C. Lottery Corp. (BCLC), the Crown corporation tasked to manage gambling in the province. Over two weeks, Allison Latimer and Patrick McGowan, counsel for the Commission of Inquiry into Money Laundering in B.C., examined three former heads of security and compliance for BCLC and th...

Over two weeks, Allison Latimer and Patrick McGowan, counsel for the Commission of Inquiry into Money Laundering in B.C., examined three former heads of security and compliance for BCLC and their boss, president and CEO Jim Lightbody, in an attempt to drill down on what BCLC knew, and did – or did not do – about frequent six-figure buy-ins with small denominations bundled in elastic bands. “Was it your expectation that for players wanting to buy in at that level it would be much more convenient and easier for them to arrive with a bank draft or have funds wired rather than walking in ...