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By Anthony Vargas, Reporter
More and more, Korean crime
syndicates are using the Philippines as a hub to launder money from
their operations, a senior Philippine police official has said.
The money laundering has grown to
a point that Filipino and Korean law-enforcement authorities are
getting worried, said Rolando Garcia, executive director of the
Philippine Center for Transnational Crime.
Garcia said Korean authorities
suspect that the laundered money is returned to Korea.
“They [Korean authorities] are
concern that dirty money [being laundered here will return [or
remitted] back to clean money,” Garcia said in a recent interview.
A retired official of the
Philippine National Police, Garcia said Korean police officials are
cooperating with their local counterparts to crack down on the
Korean syndicates.
Koreans form the country’s
biggest expatriate community, with estimates ranging from 50,000 to
151,000, most of them students.
Undocumented Koreans in the
Philippines could number as high as 100,000, a senior PNP official
said.
The official said the syndicates
could be tapping the growing number of Korean businesses in the
country for money laundering.
“We have been receiving reports
that some of these [Korean] businesses were set-up here using dirty
money coming from Korea,” the official who requested not to be
named said.
The Camp Crame-based official
said authorities they are keeping close watch at least 200 Korean
businesses in the country which have been allegedly established
using dirty money.
Among these establishments are
language training centers, on-line gaming firms, and restaurants,
the official said.
Recently, the PNP signed a
Memorandum of Understanding with the Korean National Police for
better cooperation between the two forces.
The agreement seeks to explore
more effective means of sharing crime information and intelligence
to assist both forces in handling investigation of transnational
crime.
The understanding also aims to
improve the security conditions for Filipinos that have been living
or working in Korea and for the Koreans that have settled here in
the Philippines.
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