Private jets of cash
According to an article in La Presse, Martin Grenier, a Canadian from Repentigny, Quebec, was arrested in Detroit and charged on February 13, 2014, with money laundering along with two Americans, including a lawyer. Grenier is alleged to have facilitated the laundering of so much cash, that private jets were used to transport some of the funds from Canada to the US and then to two offshore tax havens, Panama and the Bahamas.
Also arrested was Mark A. Hopkins, an American attorney from Chicago who is alleged to have facilitated monetary transfers for Grenier. A third person, Mark Jovett Apsey, was also arrested.
The criminal compliant, filed in Michigan, describes how the Drug Enforcement Agency learned of the alleged money laundering activity after intercepting a call involving Apsey in which the latter is alleged to have made arrangements for the courier of a suitcase containing $365,000 cash from New York by Romulus that was intercepted and seized.
Subsequent to the seizure, Apsey is alleged to have contacted Grenier to inform him of the seizure and according to the criminal complaint, Grenier then contacted a lawyer in Quebec to fabricate fake contracts justifying the payment of $365,000 in the US, a form of trade-based money laundering. The fake contract was for services between a jewelry designer in New York and Apsey’s company.
According to this article in La Presse, Grenier ran several businesses, including Knowledge Capital based in Calgary, Beetz Energy based in Laval and Canada Transaction Network based in Quebec.