Someone paid a Vancouver city tax bill with C$47,700 in cash, before money-laundering fears triggered limits
- City Hall took millions in large cash transactions, including one tax payment that would have weighed 2.2kg in C$20 notes
- A councillor described encountering a man at City Hall with a shopping bag filled with stacks of money, who asked where to pay his taxes
Vancouver City Councillor Melissa De Genova was walking through the ground floor of City Hall, pushing her baby daughter in a stroller, when she was approached by a man carrying an open shopping bag, filled with bundles of cash.
“I could clearly see the money in it … it was stacked quite neatly,” she recalled.
Where could he pay his taxes, he asked the surprised politician.
De Genova said the incident in July 2018 wasn’t the first such scene she had witnessed at City Hall; on another occasion she had seen someone with a large stack of money in a fanny pack.
The unusual encounters would spur De Genova to put forward a motion to council in January 2019 calling on city staff to look into how to better combat money laundering. The motion, which cited concerns that cash payments to the city, which can be made anonymously, might be used as a laundering conduit, was passed unanimously and swiftly resulted in a ban on cash payments for city bills of C$10,000 (US$8,030) or more.
Now, documents released under a Freedom of Information request have shown just how much cash was being handed over the counter at City Hall.
