Press Release: Canada marketed abroad as a secrecy jurisdiction to crooks and tax cheats: new report

Press Release: Canada marketed abroad as a secrecy jurisdiction to crooks and tax cheats: new report
March 16th, 2022

Canada is known as an easy place to launder dirty money, or ‘snow-wash’. It’s not just the experts who know this though. International corporate service providers actively promote incorporating companies in Canada to clients who wish to take advantage of lax secrecy laws and low financial crime enforcement.

In this new report, TI Canada and our ‘End Snow Washing’ Coalition partners - Publish What You Pay Canada and Canadians for Tax Fairness - review company formation agents who promote Canada as a secrecy jurisdiction. In our research, we profile corporate service provider websites in English, Mandarin, and Russian.

Sample quotes from intermediary websites:

“Canada, as a high taxation country, is not a bad front at all, it is actually a very useful cover for almost all types of offshore companies..”1

“Canada offers a high level of anonymity and privacy”2

“Canada will not be considered as an offshore company ... No disclosure of beneficial ownership to authorities”3

“If you have previously used UK partnership structures in business, which were distinguished by a high level of confidentiality, then given today’s realities, many factors have changed and a Canadian LP would be the best choice.”4

Canadian limited partnerships have been linked to large money laundering schemes including those originating from Russia and former Soviet states. We were able to identify some of these links by using the UK’s publicly accessible beneficial ownership registry, where the otherwise secretive Canadian entities left a footprint.

In April 2021, Canada’s federal government committed to a publicly accessible beneficial ownership registry as part of its federal budget, and expanded the reporting entities that must conduct beneficial ownership due diligence. But the registry is not scheduled to come online until 2025. The ‘End Snow Washing’ Coalition urges the federal government to strike a fresh agreement with provinces for a pan-Canadian, publicly accessible beneficial ownership registry ahead of schedule.

Read the full report here: Snow-washing Inc: How Canada is marketed abroad as a secrecy jurisdiction

1 https://tax-free.today/blog/registering-a-business-in-canada/ (accessed March 25, 2021)

2 https://www.sfm.com/canada-company-formation (accessed March 25, 2021)

3 https://www.icd-fiduciaries.com/en/offshore-company/canada/ (accessed March 25, 2021)

4 https://internationalwealth.info/offshore-company-formation/canadian-partnership-best-alternative-british-lps/ (accessed and translated using Google Translate on March 25, 2021)

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For Media Requests, please contact:

James Cohen, Executive Director

Phone: 416-488-3939

Email: ti-can@transparencycanada.ca

For information about the ‘End Snow-washing’ Campaign, please contact:

Sasha Caldera, Beneficial Ownership Transparency Campaign Manager,