Friday, February 11, 2011

 

The International Monetary Fund estimates that today the annual amount laundered worldwide is between 2 and 5 percent of the world's gross domestic product (GDP), between $1 and $5 trillion U.S. dollars.

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BC Mary comment:  As you read these quotes from the book, Lawyers Gone Bad,  think back to December 28, 2003 when police raided the BC Legislature tracking the man they thought was "Mr Big" on the West Coast, trafficking cocaine between Vancouver and Toronto. It turned out to be true. But somehow, BC Rail got in the way. And somehow, BC Rail was never fully  explained either.

"Mr Big" went to trial in Victoria, B.C. in June 2008, was found guilty and sentenced to 9 years (plus large fine) in September 2008. But not a word about it was published. Not then, not now. Mr Big was released very early and is free to walk among us again, too. Nothing published. Think about that, bear it in mind, as you read what Philip Slayton has to say. 



From "Lawyers Gone Bad" by Philip Slayton, former Dean of Law at the University of Western Ontario.


Quote from Page 103-104:


The scale and complexity of crime have changed since Al Capone [and his laundromats] ... The International Monetary Fund estimates that today the annual amount laundered worldwide is between 2 and 5 percent of the world's gross domestic product (GDP), between $1 and $5 trillion U.S. dollars. (Canada's annual GDP is about $1 trillion U.S. dollars) The few laundromats that remain are not up to the job. They have largely been replaced by sophisticated financial intermediaries -- including lawyers.

Lawyers have a particular advantage as money launderers. The rule of solicitor-client privilege prevents forced disclosure of what a client tells his lawyer. The international financial community and the Canadian government, including the RCMP, think that solicitor-client privilege can be used by a lawyer to hide money laundering by organized crime. This, they believe, is vaulting the legal profession into the forefront of money laundering.


Quote from Page 85:

Crooks hire lawyers. Why shouldn't they? Crooks, like everyone else, buy and sell houses, get divorces, have contractual disputes, and so on; they need legal services and are entitled to them. But crooks, unlike most people, also commit crimes. Do lawyers sometimes use their special status to help them do so? Do lawyers use the principle of solicitor-client privilege to help launder the proceeds of crime? International organizations think they do. The Canadian government, the RCMP, the Auditor General, and close observers of the scene think they do. Well-known Toronto Lawyers Simon Rosenfeld and Peter Shoniker did. How effective is the response of the law, and those who regulate the legal profession, when a lawyer works for the mob?

On March 11, 2002, Bill MacDonald, a Colombian drug cartel money man was having dinner in Miami with ... Rosenfeld. MacDonald pulled out a U.S. one-dollar bill. "If I give you this," MacDonald asked Rosenfeld, "do we have solicitor-client privilege?" "Yes," said Rosenfeld. "Okay," said MacDonald, and handed over the dollar ... with that out of the way, the two men started talking about how Rosenfeld could help launder cocaine money for Colombian drug lords. Unfortunately for Rosenfeld, "Bill MacDonald" was really Bill Majcher, an undercover RCMP working on a joint RCMP/FBI sting ...

... at a March 18 sentencing hearing [for Rosenfeld], Majcher said that lawyers have become key players in money-laundering operations because they are not obliged by law to report suspicious financial transactions. "In almost every case we are doing," said Majcher, "lawyers are central."


Quote from Page 97-99:

Peter Shoniker, a graduate of the University of Ottawa law school, came to serious public attention in 1986 when he was a 31-year-old assistant Crown attorney driving a car with the vanity licence plate "JAIL4U". [and Wearing a bullet-proof vest and accompanied by two bodyguards].

... It was a considerable shock to the Ontario establishment, and presumably to Shoniker's eminent friends, when, on June 14, 2004 he was arrested on money-laundering and related charges ... He was accused of laundering about $750,000 supplied by RCMP undercover agent Al Lewis as part of an elaborate 15-month sting operation ... money ... skimmed from the pension account of the United Steelworkers of America's Hamilton branch ...


The Effects of Money Laundering
Currency of Choice

http://money.howstuffworks.com/money-laundering4.htm

For decades, the U.S. dollar has been the most popular currency for launders to use. Its popularity is due to its wide acceptance and the volume of worldwide transactions that use the currency -- a few million extra dollars changing hands doesn't attract attention. However, the euro has slowly gained a foothold in the laundering industry since its introduction into common use in 2002. As far as money laundering goes, the euro could be the perfect currency: It is the main legal tender of more than a dozen countries, meaning it circulates in tremendous volume and moves regularly across borders without any notice at all.
Depending on which international agency you ask, criminals launder anywhere between $500 billion and $1 trillion worldwide every year. The global effect is staggering in social, economic and security terms.

On the socio-cultural end of the spectrum, successfully laundering money means that criminal activity actually does pay off. This success encourages criminals to continue their illicit schemes because they get to spend the profit with no repercussions. This means more fraud, more corporate embezzling (which means more workers losing their pensions when the corporation collapses), more drugs on the streets, more drug-related crime, law-enforcement resources stretched beyond their means and a general loss of morale on the part of legitimate business people who don't break the law and don't make nearly the profits that the criminals do.

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BC Mary: I've always wondered how that $6 or $7BILLION per year which police say is sloshing around in British Columbia in the marijuana trade, gets absorbed into the economy. Don't the banks notice? Don't the Real Estate brokers notice?  Well, it's pretty doggone interesting, as explained HERE.

http://money.howstuffworks.com/money-laundering4.htm
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This book, Lawyers Gone Bad, cost me a mere $14.00 and what a bargain. I wrote to Mr Slayton, almost on bended knee, asking him to consider writing the book on the BC Rail Political Corruption Trial. He replied: "It looks like it has the makings of a great story, but it's not something I can pick up at the minute. My book on the Supreme Court (Mighty Judgment) is out in April, and I'm going to have to spend a lot of time on that. And I've already started on a new book, about the police. Cheers, Philip Slayton"   

Disclosure:  I regularly ask Robin Mathews (almost on bended knee) if HE will write the book, including all the previously unmentioned sights and thoughts he hasn't published yet.  I have also asked Bill Tieleman, but Bill's response was clinically weighed pro- and con-, explaining conclusively that it was not a good idea for him to pursue.  Laila is already doing more than enough.  Me, I feel that the challenge is too awesome, although I intended from the get-go, to build this blog into an Archive for others to use ...

So as a last resort, I keep asking (almost on bended knee) for a Public Inquiry on BC Rail which would at very least bring forth the true story and hold it in trust for the future. It's our history, after all, which left as it is -- with all threads dangling -- is a pitiful record unworthy of the Province of British Columbia.

I'd love to hear my readers' responses to the Slayton book excerpts, and who you think should be writing the book on BC Rail. Don't miss the small video of Philip Slayton explaining the theme of his forthcoming book on the Supreme Court. It's on his web-site HERE


http://www.philipslayton.com/

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Comments:
THE "UNOFFICIAL" INQUIRY INTO THE POLITICAL THEFT OF BC RAIL, by BC Mary.

Please accept my application to purchase 4 copies of your book.
I am prepared to pay $40/copy and $100 for a signed 1rst edition.

Please advise when the book is available for purchase and if you will be tour/selling at our local Chapters or Mosaic book store.
 
ron wilton,

Haaa! ... that's a sweet contribution to the TLR Chuckle Bucket,

and don't I wish it could be true.

Very nice of you to say that, even in jest. Many thanks.
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Yeah, Robin Mathews! I read him every chance and if ever there was a gifted author with the right subject, it is Robin Mathews with 'The Real Train Robbery.' You could help with editing - it's what you do! Nobody else needed.
 
Have a read of latest John le Carre book:

Our Kind of Traitor

Russian money laundering brotherhood plus British Intelligence Establishment at forefront of this intriguing novel.

"A first-class novel about the most pressing moral and political concerns of our time" per Charles Cumming, Telegraph News.

I like that 'most pressing moral and political concerns of our time' -- doesn't that just suit our BC Rail situation too, as well as run-of-river projects and P3's.
 
And Mulroney in the news telling Harper to stay the course.
http://www.canada.com/business/Mulroney+Harper+Stick+guns+continental+security+trade+negotiations/4268444/story.html
Read the Mulroney story also, "On The Take". Sickening. The connections. Fits right in with the bunch in Victoria.
 
not only in bc canada, pity
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/07/tax-city-heist-of-century
 
Thanks for this anonymous tip. The following is from George Monbiot writing in The Guardian (U.K.) on Feb. 7, 2011.


Monbriot writes:

To us, it's an obscure shift of tax law. To the City, it's the heist of the century

In David Cameron [current Prime Minister of Britain] we have a leader whose job is to quietly legitimise a semi-criminal, money-laundering economy

'I would love to see tax reductions," David Cameron told the Sunday Telegraph at the weekend, "but when you're borrowing 11% of your GDP, it's not possible to make significant net tax cuts. It just isn't." Oh no? Then how come he's planning the biggest and crudest corporate tax cut in living memory?

If you've heard nothing of it, you're in good company. The obscure adjustments the government is planning to the tax acts of 1988 and 2009 have been missed by almost everyone – and are, anyway, almost impossible to understand without expert help. But as soon as you grasp the implications, you realise that a kind of corporate coup d'etat is taking place.

Like the dismantling of the NHS [National Health Service] and the sale of public forests, no one voted for this measure, as it wasn't in the manifestos. While Cameron insists that he occupies the centre ground of British politics, that he shares our burdens and feels our pain, he has quietly been plotting with banks and businesses to engineer the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle to the ultra-rich that this country has seen in a century.

The latest heist has been explained to me by the former tax inspector, now a Private Eye journalist, Richard Brooks and current senior tax staff who can't be named. Here's how it works...

BC Mary says: Read more. The URL will be in the next comment.
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Got it:

The Monbriot article -- HEIST OF THE CENTURY -- is here in full:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/07/tax-city-heist-of-century
 
Here is another Guardian article, from 2009:


http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money-banks-saved-un-cfief-claims
 
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