CANADIAN LAWYER WHO WAS MOSSACK'S AGENT FOLLOWED TRADITIONAL MONEY LAUNDERING TECHNIQUES

The former British Colombian lawyer, Frederick Langford Sharp, who was Mossack Fonseca's principal player in Canada, employed the techniques and strategies of career money launderers, frankly, because he was one. Sharp's company, Corporate House (now reportedly known as Lake House Group), registered over one thousand companies through the Mossack law firm.

His tradecraft was simple:

(1) He used an offshore entity, Bond & Co. in Belize, but employed Companies House, an onshore company, as an intermediary; no references were ever made to Bond and Co. with clients.
(2) He ordered that no annual invoices, or statements of account were ever to be sent to the clients, via email, fax, or post.
(3) Printed statements of account and annual invoices were to be destroyed.
(4) He had a computer server set up in Panama, which was outside the reach of Canadian law enforcement subpoenas and warrants.
(5)  His staff were never to include a reference, or anything else in the attention line or heading, on correspondence and transmittals.
(6)  he offered to set up representative offices for clients, and to structure business, so that no taxable income resulted from the arrangement.
(7) He used an international courier service for all documents, and instructed staff to neither bill the clients for the courier, nor to place any name in the reference.
(8) Many of the Canadian clients had companies formed for them in Hong Kong, making document retrieval, and information access, problematic, for any regulator or law enforcement agency not located in Asia.


These are not the methods of a financial services professional; they are the acts and deeds of a financial criminal,  specifically a money launderer. Unfortunately, it took several years for the Law Society of British Colombia, to suspend attorney Sharp from the practice of law. Once he was no longer subject to its jurisdiction, he simply failed to ask for reinstatement, after his suspension term had expired.

As more details emerge, in the Panama Papers, we shall analyze them, and report back to our readers, on their significance and meaning.