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INTRODUCTION
Canada's present money laundering offence allows professional money launderers to exist as anonymous actors committing invisible crimes.1 This is so because a predicate offence is integral to the offence structure.2 The predicate offence is an act that makes the money dirty, and in Canada the predicate offence is further prescribed as an indictable offence under an act of Parliament.3 Professional money launderers are dissociated by design from the illegal activity of the predicate offences, providing a service to organized crime groups engaged in generating dirty money.4 Dissociation from the predicate offence makes the money laundering not only nearly impossible to prove in court, but extremely difficult for law enforcement to connect, especially if the predicate offence occurs outside of Canada.5
A solution to this problem is to reconstitute the offence so that it does not require proof of a predicate offence, or proof of knowledge of a predicate offence. Exactly how this could be done is the focus of this report.
1.PROFESSIONAL MONEY LAUNDERERS
In order to determine how criminal law should respond to professional money launderers (PMLs), if it is to be effective, some understanding of what PMLs are, the risk they pose, and how they work is critical. Professional money laundering is a type of third-party money laundering.6 The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a recognized anti-money laundering (AML) think-tank, monitor of states, and inter-governmental body that sets global AML standards, defines third-party money laundering as "the laundering of proceeds by a person who was not involved in the predicate offence."7 By definition, then, what makes a third party is the dissociation from the predicate offence. The professional launderer may have no knowledge whatsoever of what made the money dirty, but they know it is not legitimate. The actions of PMLs are without a doubt intentional. They are paid a commission or a fee for hiding the origins of funds, legitimizing proceeds of crime, and ultimately helping those responsible for predicate offences to retain their ill-gotten gains.8 Self-laundering, on the other hand, is laundering the proceeds of crime that one was involved in making.9
Canada's Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre (FINTRAC) goes further with their definition, calling PMLs sophisticated and referring specifically to transnational crime: "Professional money launderers are sophisticated actors...