Shocked! Shocked, I Say!

A crack-down by the U.S. Treasury Department on money laundering in the lucrative South Florida real estate market has been expanded to include Broward and Palm Beach.

In January of 2016 the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network enacted a “geographic targeting order” which requires title insurance firms to require names of owners of offshore shell companies that pay cash to purchase high-end property in Manhattan and Miami. That policy has now been expanded to include Broward and Palm Beach Counties, as well as other luxury real estate markets in New York, California and Texas.

According to “FinCen” roughly a quarter of reported transactions in Miami and Manhattan involved people who were separately the subject of suspicious activity reports by banks and other financial institutions, indicating possible criminal activity.

The Miami Herald published an interesting article last April (which you can read by clicking this link ) discussing the possibility that much of this funny money might have fueled the city’s luxury condo boom and inflate property prices.

One reported instance concerned a corrupt South American government official who was accused to stealing millions from his country, who set up a shell corporation in the Cayman Islands and then purchased high-end property in Miami.

On the surface, this might not seem so out of the ordinary. For starters, name one story out of Miami that does NOT included a corrupt South American government official, let alone stolen millions and shell corporations in the Caymans.

We still find it shocking, however, to think some people might be laundering money through our real estate market.

This is South Florida. I thought we only laundered drug money here.

As Omar Little once said: “Man’s got to have a code.”