Australian Damien Carew’s alleged Irish connection in money laundering scam revealed
A former student from Melbourne’s elite St Kevin’s school is the target of a massive money laundering investigation. Now, his alleged associate can be named.
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A wealthy alleged associate of a Melbourne man accused of trying to murder his glamorous bride on the Cote D’Azur has been named as running a large-scale money laundering scheme in a British court.
French authorities are holding Damien Carew, a St Kevin’s old boy turned real estate entrepreneur, in jail on suspicion of trying to kill his wife at their home near billionaire’s enclave Monaco in April last year.
Carew has also been charged with separate serious offences by elite law enforcement squad Junalco as part of an investigation triggered after firefighters picked him up drunk on a Paris street holding more than $300,000 in cash in a bag in late 2021.
In the same French money laundering investigation, Junalco has been scrutinising an Irish businessman involved in managing money for the ultra-rich who can now be named for the first time as Michael Burke Jr.
Detailed allegations against Mr Burke Jr, the heir to an Irish pharmaceutical fortune, have been made in open court in Britain during the trial of Jian Wen, a former worker in a Chinese takeaway restaurant who was sentenced to six years jail for money laundering last Friday.
The hearings have shed light on the secretive but lucrative world of offshore finance and real estate, where both Carew and Mr Burke Jr have worked.
Both worked in Dubai’s real estate industry at around the same time in the late 2000s, where the Australian was touted as a “real estate ace” and the Irishman was the co-owner of real estate agency Arabian Escapes.
Carew went on to run a restaurant and trade diamonds in Dubai before moving to France and running a real estate company in Monaco, while Mr Burke Jr has since been involved with companies offering services to the ultra-rich including buying real estate and luxury cars, organising travel and managing their wealth.
Carew has now spent more than a year languishing in the Nice remand centre, the maison d’arret, for the attempted murder of his wife, Anna Polianskaya-Carew.
Meanwhile, the whereabouts of Mr Burke Jr, who is not involved in the attempted murder matter, are unknown.
He is the son of Michael Burke, who set up generic medicine company Chanelle Pharma, and the brother of entrepreneur Chanelle McCoy, who is married to former champion jockey AP McCoy.
His family is not alleged to have engaged in any wrongdoing.
Wen’s trial traced her meteoric rise from making less than $25,000 in her takeaway job to a life of luxury that included renting a mansion for $30,000 a month, frequent travel around Europe and splashing out hundreds of thousands of dollars at Swiss jewellers.
During the trial, the court heard that Wen used property in Dubai – a favourite destination among the criminal classes – as well as cash bitcoin sales and “black” prepaid cards, allegedly organised with Mr Burke Jr’s help, to wash part of the billions of dollars reaped from a mammoth fraud in China by a woman friend of Wen’s.
A series of raids on Wen’s rented mansion resulted in UK police making the country’s biggest ever seizure of Bitcoin, worth more than £2bn ($4bn).
The court heard that she approached Mr Burke Jr for help in September 2018 after repeated attempts to buy some of London’s priciest properties failed because lawyers involved were not happy with her explanation of where the tens of millions of dollars she was offering came from.
Prosecutors said Mr Burke Jr “comes with a health warning” and the services he offered clients were mostly “ways to invest and convert property the origins of which are in question or illegal”.
These services, offered through companies in Switzerland and the Seychelle Islands, included the private sale of cryptocurrency and holding money for clients in accounts they could dip into using prepaid “black cards”, the court heard.
The court heard that in a November 2018 WhatsApp message Wen told Mr Burke Jr she was having difficulty filling out the form required to become his client because it asked for the source of her wealth.
“Between you and me, what is the real source of funds, and I will think of something,” he responded in a message read to the court.
“I have a few ideas. Don’t worry, I can do what I need to make this work. Just put down ‘family wealth’.”
The court heard that in 2019, Wen used bitcoin to buy two properties in Dubai worth almost $1m.
The two properties Wen bought were rented out and one was flipped within a year to produce a laundered flow of cash, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors also alleged that Mr Burke Jr came up with another money laundering scheme where Wen would set up a fake consulting business in the UK, using other companies he worked with as clients.
“I have a very good plan for you,” Mr Burke Jr said in a voice message to Wen that was played to the jury.
He said the plan would be “up and running in the next four to six weeks and will solve everything: that will cover rent, credit card, hotel bills, restaurant fees…”
The company would pay her a wage of £10,000 ($20,000) a month and make a big enough profit that “you can take a quarter of a million (pound) dividend every year and show a good living”, Mr Burke Jr said.
Mr Burke Jr was not charged with any offence in the UK case and did not have an opportunity to respond to the allegations against him because he was not called as a witness.
Last year, a French judicial source said he was referred to “in the context of the judicial investigation concerning counts of aggravated money laundering, customs money laundering” and criminal conspiracy.
However, he has not been charged with any crime or arrested and there is no suggestion Junalco’s allegations are true, only that it has been investigating them.
His Australian lawyer declined to comment on the record.
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