Hey, who let in all these rich foreigners?

Canada discovers that when you make it really easy to launder money and buy land anonymously, lots of interesting people turn up.

The loopholes in British Columbia are as majestic as the mountain vistas. It’s perfectly legal, for example, to purchase the shares of a “bare trust,” whose sole asset is a home, rather than buying the property itself. Technically, the title never changes hands, allowing the buyer to avoid land-transfer taxes. Until September, it was also possible to buy a property using an anonymous corporation with a lawyer as its lone director, or to appoint a “nominee shareholder” who controlled this anonymous company—without disclosing the true ownership in either case. Meanwhile, lawyers in British Columbia, as in the rest of Canada, are exempt from key provisions of anti-money-laundering law, a standard that national lawyers’ associations went to the Supreme Court to protect, on grounds of attorney-client privilege.

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