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News from the Caribbean as of
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Bahamas money manager pleads guilty in $1 billion laundering scheme
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
by David Glovin
NEW YORK, USA (Bloomberg): Martin Tremblay, a Canadian money manager who operated a Bahamas-based investment firm, pleaded guilty to federal charges stemming from what authorities said was a $1 billion money-laundering operation.
Tremblay, 44, who was president of Nassau-based Dominion Investments Ltd., was charged in January with running a seven-year money-laundering scheme for tax cheats, drug dealers, and stock swindlers. He's been in federal prison in New York ever since.
Tremblay on Monday pleaded guilty to a single count of money laundering, admitting that he agreed to launder $20,000 in proceeds from what he believed was a narcotics deal last year.
"I knew that was wrong," Tremblay told US District Judge John Keenan in Manhattan.
Prosecutors said Dominion Investments was paid large commissions to launder cash for clients seeking to hide the source of their money. Dominion transferred the funds to accounts in the US, Canada, the Bahamas and elsewhere, prosecutors said.
Tremblay, who is from Quebec, faces between 70 months and 87 months in prison when he's sentenced on February 13.
Tremblay was among the largest money-launderers ever investigated by the Internal Revenue Service. The case grew out of an undercover sting operation by federal and New York state authorities in 2005 in which Tremblay was videotaped agreeing to launder large sums of money, prosecutors said. His operation, which criminals used to launder $1 billion, ran from 1998 to 2005, they said.
Investigators said they found more than 100 suspicious accounts held by Tremblay and Dominion into which his clients deposited and hid assets.
"International narcotics traffickers, pyramid schemers, stock fraudsters, and tax evaders utilised Tremblay and Dominion Investments to launder the proceeds of their crimes," Assistant US Attorney Glen McGorty said in a July court filing.
Part of the indictment accused Tremblay of laundering $50 million from a tax-evasion and wire-fraud scheme and helping hide $3 million in proceeds from the sale of so-called date-rape drug kits.
The case is US v. Tremblay, 05-cr-783, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
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