Casinogate: Shutting Down IGET In 2009....There Was Paper.

AllYourEvidencesAndExigents
'RUsVille


As previously noted, in 2010 Sean Holman captured Mr. Rich Coleman, on video, saying that there was absolutely no government documentation to explain why he shut down the integrated illegal gaming enforcement team in 2009 because, and I quote, "I don't deal in paper" (see 3min 50sec of the embedded video). 

Well...

Sam Cooper of Postmedia has determined, unequivocally, that there was, indeed, paper:

B.C.’s illegal gambling task force was shut down in 2009 due to urgent “funding pressure” on the B.C. Lottery Corp., according to a confidential B.C. government memo obtained by Postmedia News.

The March 2016 memo for then finance minister Mike de Jong, is the first known document indicating the illegal gambling task force was disbanded by B.C. officials for financial reasons.

Also, the document suggests, in the aftermath of the unit’s closure, organized crime in B.C. has been able to increase its dangerous reach into both legal and illegal casinos, for the purposes of money laundering.

The document was prepared for de Jong by B.C.’s Gaming Policy Enforcement Branch. It says that from 2003 to 2009, the Integrated Illegal Gaming Enforcement Team (IIGET) investigated crimes surrounding “common gaming” houses, animal fighting, and bookmaking. The unit was not tasked with investigating money laundering in B.C.’s licensed casinos, the document says.

But IIGET managers in January 2009 filed a threat-assessment asking for an expanded role, and warning of the potential influence of organized crime in B.C. Lottery Corp. regulated casinos.

Instead, in April 2009, B.C.’s illegal gambling task force was disbanded...


Gosh.

Who, exactly, was the chair of the BCLC in 2009, and who did he later end up working for in the most conflicty of circumstances?

And, who, exactly, made the (alleged) decision to squeeze the BCLC's funding all those years ago?


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Interestingly, an E-Division document that Mr. Holman unearthed all those years ago has much of the same language in it as the doc Mr. Cooper has unearthed, including the term 'exigent funding pressure' on the BCLC.
Mr. Coleman's claim to Mr. Holman in 2010 was that, based on the advice of his people, he shut down IGET because it wasn't working and that he was doing something better, instead. Since that time, demonstrably problematic transactions (i.e. the ones we actually know about) have skyrocketed.
Now, getting back to this hypothesis about what was really going down within GordCo, circa 2009 that I've been working on...Time to start connecting some magic carpet dots, that involved yet another former GordCo-appointed BCLC chair, I reckon.

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