Former governors Javier Duarte with 30 houses in Florida and Thomas Yarrington with the properties he confessed to having in Texas and South Padre Island, as well as the former secretary of Public Safety, Genaro Garcia Luna with his $ 3.3 million house in Golden Beach are examples of Mexican politicians buying the most properties in United States to launder your money.
According to the document “Acres of Money Laundering, Why American Real Estate Companies are the Dream of the Kleptocracy”, prepared by the think tank Global Finance Integrity, Mexico leads the world political class that thus hides its illicit profits, along with Venezuela, Guatemala, Malaysia and Nigeria.
The analysis of 125 cases by Global Finance Integrity, which includes Mexican politicians, estimates that between 2015 and 2020 at least $ 2.3 trillion was laundered in the United States real estate sector, $ 1.1 trillion in the United Kingdom, and $ 626 million in Canada.
They report cases such as the purchase of a skyscraper in New York by the Iranian government and the loss of hundreds of jobs in West Virginia and Ohio when it was discovered that millions of dollars invested there were due to a money laundering scheme through assets roots by Ukrainian oligarchs.
And he explains that criminals choose to buy real estate to launder their money because they maintain a stable value, it allows them to accumulate wealth and hide their origin, there is limited supervision that allows them to hide their property, they can generate income through rentals or its promotion and thus they avoid bank accounts under greater surveillance and even emphasize that it is easier to get rid of this recovery of assets, either from the authorities or the next politician to take power.
Mexicans are case number six exposed in the document, entitled Money From Political Corruption Launched Through the Real State of the United States by Using Lawyers.
The research holds that United States became one of the first countries at risk of money laundering in the real estate sector despite the fact that in 1988 it modified its law on financial institutions in banking secrecy, but today it has one of the weakest laws among the members of the G7 to avoid money laundering. After the 2011 attacks, an exemption was established that seemed temporary, but has prevailed for more than 20 years, to the real estate industry “that created some of the loopholes that today allows kleptocrats, hostile governments, drug traffickers and human rights violators , launder your money in real estate in the United States ”.
It details that at least four cases of high Mexican officials accused of corruption, embezzlement and inexplicable enrichment acquired real estate for millions of dollars in United Statess. In the case of the former governor of Veracruz, he cites at least four journalistic investigations from Spain and the United States to detail that he was accused in 2016 of embezzling 26 million dollars and even promoting drug trafficking activities and acquired at least 90 properties in Mexico, Spain and the United States. , using attorneys and business partners at the helm of a complicated network of companies in Texas, Delaware and Florida.
Meanwhile, according to the National Association of Real Estate Brokers in the United States, foreign real estate buyers represented $ 54 billion last year and are mainly from Canada, Mexico, China, India and the United Kingdom, who prefer to buy them in Florida, California, Texas, Arizona, New York and New Jersey and on average pay a higher price -351 thousand dollars- than the houses for sale in that country that amounts to 305 thousand dollars.
Another profile detected by real estate sellers is that 39 percent of foreign buyers pay in cash, while the rest of those who acquire a residence pay in 19 percent of the cases this way.
The year that more Mexicans bought real estate in the United States was 2017, when transactions totaled 9.3 billion dollars, and then fell the following year to 4.2 and continue to fall to 3.7 billion in 2019. In 2020 dynamism recovered to reach 5.8, to drop again in 2021 (taking into account the fiscal year that begins in April and ends in March of the following year) to 2.9 trillion dollars in transactions.
Acquisitions of real estate in the United States by foreigners, according to the real estate industry, fell 27 percent due to the coronavi pandemicrus in the last year, while the participation of Mexicans in these purchases plummeted by 50 percent.
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