Australian drug lords funnelling cash through Belt and Road
A secret report has unmasked at least three of Australia’s biggest organised crime lords and their links to China’s controversial Belt and Road deal.
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At least three of the nation’s top organised crime figures are directly investing in China’s Belt and Road scheme in a bid to launder tens of millions of dollars from drugs trafficked to Australia.
A classified Australian Federal Police-Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) investigations brief has uncovered a direct correlation between Australian drug money and China’s trade initiative specifically through the Middle East and Africa.
News Corp Australia can reveal it names three top tier Australian Priority Organisation Targets (APOTS) – a fluid list of intelligence-based suspects behind drug-based organised crime activity – as funnelling money from the trafficking of cocaine, meth and heroin into Australia through China’s program.
Other foreign criminal figures are also alleged to be laundering money through the program, including a shadowy former 14K Triad boss Wan Kuok-koi – known as “Broken Tooth”.
The revelation comes as the Federal Government on Wednesday formally tore up Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews controversial Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) agreement with China as inconsistent with Australia’s national interests.
Launched in 2013, the BRI is a land and sea-based infrastructure strategy China is developing to spread its influence throughout the Asian region and beyond with direct investment in more than 70 countries.
It is billed as a centrepiece of the Chinese Communist Party’s “bid to enhance regional connectivity”.
Critics also point to its potential for debt-trap diplomacy, binding struggling countries to China.
It has long been debated where the funding for the BRI scheme would come from since China was working with dozens of impoverished or financially struggling nations.
For the past year US Homeland Security and Australian-based intelligence has pointed to monies coming from Australian crime lords.
News Corp Australia can reveal law enforcement has traced the money being indirectly “invested” in various legitimate infrastructure projects specifically in Zimbabwe in Africa, Pakistan, Oman in the Middle East and Myanmar.
They are generally made in terms favourable to the host, ignorant of the source, but in exchange for cleaning their funds in return.
Authorities won’t divulge the nature of the investing but it could be infrastructure or a BRI backed trading initiative.
Such is the accumulated wealth from the cocaine and other drug sales, police have uncovered evidence of the creativity of king pins to launder funds through legitimate business operations including property development, logistic freighting and even front companies buying even bulk meat consignments as genuine foreign trade to ship overseas to clean money. Bulk wine purchases such as top shelf brands and luxury cars are also being purchased and shipped overseas for sale, with a large price discount still making it a viable launder.
One of the Australian crime lords designated a priority target is currently based in the Netherlands who in 2007 was implicated and jailed over the world record 4.4 tonnes of ecstasy trafficked to Melbourne from the Dutch Belgium border.
In the five years since he has been released he is suspected of reconnecting with the criminal milieu including the Calabrian Mafia and another organised crime figure in Cambodia for MDMA and cocaine shipment plots to Australia.
The other two are Asian-Australian businessmen, one of whom is based in Hong Kong, working with Outlaw Motorcyle Gangs notably the Comancheros to facilitate bulk drug trafficking operations to Australia.
The cancelling of the memorandum of understanding between Victoria and China is set to further erode relations between Australia and China, sparked by Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s call for an independent probe on the origins of COVID-19.
China saw that call as a slight and retaliated with a raft of trade sanctions including bans and crippling taxes on Australian imports including beef, barley, sugar, coal and wine.
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Originally published as Australian drug lords funnelling cash through Belt and Road
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