A specialist casino investigations team is targeting offshore gamblers pumping millions through casinos on flying visits to New Zealand.
The team is part of a major reshuffle at Internal Affairs, which is also establishing a major investigations team tasked with prosecuting sophisticated poker machine frauds, an area where it has faced major recent criticism. DIA staff and Internal Affairs Minister Chris Tremain have been briefed on the changes in the past few days. The casino team will be told its priority is potential money-laundering.
“There are some examples of people being in New Zealand for a relatively short period of time and putting quite a lot of money through the casino,” said Maarten Quivooy, Internal Affairs’ general manager of regulatory and compliance operations. “We are not saying that’s necessarily anything illegal, but it does raise the question ‘what do we know about these things?’
“One profile we pulled out of the system was an Asian person who was in the country less than a week and I think their expenditure was around $9 million. Again, you have to stress that you don’t know if there was money laundering, but I think we need to get a little smarter about understanding these patterns of casino use and ensuring they are appropriate.”
Quivooy said Internal Affairs had seen success in cross-border operations on illegal internet pornography, and wanted to work with agencies in Asia and Australia to track big-money gamblers.
“Yes, we will continue to attend the day-to-day issues at casinos, but beyond that we need to be thinking about what are the big issues of compliance for casinos, and that opens up questions, for example, about money laundering. We are not doing this simply because we are concerned about money laundering in casinos, but because we want to tighten our focus.”
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