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The admission by Mounties – one of Australia’s largest club groups – it allowed 13 customers to launder up to $226 million through poker machines is another self-regulation fail by a NSW gambling operator under the wilfully blind eye of government.
The watchdog agency, the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre, is suing Mounties in the Federal Court for non-compliance with anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing laws, arguing the club did not do enough to prevent, identify and punish criminal networks that have flourished on the gaming floor.
Until now, Mounties has defended itself claiming it had relied “in good faith” on an anti-money laundering program provided by independent gambling consultant BetSafe.
But a cache of documents obtained by the Herald’s Bevan Shields and Harriet Alexander show Mounties now accepts it was “ultimately responsible” for compliance with money laundering and terror financing laws and rules.
In an agreed statement of facts filed with the Federal Court last month, Mounties repeatedly ignored obvious signs of money laundering, particularly at Mount Pritchard, the “mother club” of the group’s empire, which spreads from south-west Sydney to the northern beaches and beyond to the Central Coast. The $226 million in funds used at Mount Pritchard and Cabramatta between 2019 and 2024 is more than half the $507.5 million total poker machine revenue at both venues.
Mounties’ admission that it allowed criminal activity to go unchecked paves the way for huge penalties – fines for breaches range from $21 million to $31.3 million – and a major shake-up of how other Sydney club operators monitor and sanction suspected launderers, particularly those which use BetSafe.
Money laundering and gambling operators have a lock step history in NSW.
In 2000, a young National Party MP, Rob Oakeshott revealed more than half the top 20 list of high rollers at the Star City casino lived in Sydney’s poorest suburbs. One gambled $94 million in six months.
Government did very little. The Bell inquiry in 2022 found that the systemic failures regarding anti-money laundering continued to be rife. The same year, a NSW Crime Commission inquiry into money laundering in pubs and clubs found billions of dollars in dirty money was being ploughed through the state’s poker machines. It also recommended cashless gaming.
How’s that going?
April 10 marked 500 days since the NSW Independent Panel for Gaming Reform handed its final report, a 30 point road map focused on mandatory cashless gaming and stronger harm minimisation, to the Minns government. There is still no formal response.
While Macquarie Street fiddles, shining a light on Mounties’ nefarious lack of action on money launderers did elicit a mea culpa from the club group. “Mounties takes its regulatory obligations seriously and acknowledges that the community rightly expects better, and that we should have done better,” a spokesman said.
In response to our investigation, Mounties also took out a full-page advertisement in the Herald promoting how much it contributed to community groups, junior sport and health care.
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