European Commissioner until last weekend, great figure of the liberal party and of Belgian political life over the last 30 years, Didier Reynders, searched and interviewed by the police yesterday Tuesday, is therefore suspected of money laundering via banknotes lottery. He is the subject of an investigation by the Brussels public prosecutor’s office launched in 2023 and concerning elements which would extend over several years, and until at least last year. For a “significant” amount but not revealed until now.
According to our colleagues at Evening and the investigative media platform “Follow the money”, the main elements of which have been confirmed to us, tIt would have started with a denunciation of the Financial Information Processing Unit (CTIF) and the National Lottery.Didier Reynders, who was Federal Minister of Finance (1999-2011) – with supervision over the Lottery from 2007 to 2011 – is suspected of having purchased “e-tickets”, i.e. vouchers of 1 to 100 euros, purchasable in all points of sale and transferable to a game account hosted by the National Lottery. These lottery ticket purchases would have been made partly in cash. The winnings were first paid into the former minister’s digital account at the National Lottery, and then transferred to his current account.
Well-known games of chance for “laundering”
“Gaming turns out to be a way often used to launder black money,” indicates the Gaming Commission on its site. Even if this means involves a substantial loss of the initial stake. Concretely, we go from “cash” deposited at a tobacconist selling gaming products, to a ticket, “scriptural”, a piece of paper, a code or even a player account. According to specialists, you must then know how to choose your game, some allowing you to benefit from a higher winning yield. Example, if you have 100,000 euros to “launder”, if a game allows you to recover on average 70% of your stake, you will lose 30,000 euros but you will succeed in “laundering” 70,000 euros…
Even if there are control and anti-money laundering mechanisms. Mechanisms in banks, tax law professor Michel Maus (VUB) confirmed this morning in “De ochtend” on VRT/Radio 1. “Banks are required to check the origin of the money that appears in their customers’ accounts if, for example, it does not correspond to their usual lifestyle.” Likewise, gaming companies are required to have an internal service to detect possible attempts at money laundering, with suspicious actions to be reported to the Financial Information Processing Unit. “If a few transactions can go unnoticed, checks can be carried out over time and make it possible to detect this type of practice. A person who spends 1000 or 2000 euros per month via an e-ticket system would therefore inevitably be spotted after some time.”
For Magali Clavie, president of the Games of Chance Commission (which controls private organizations and therefore not the Lottery), these companies are required to respect a series of obligations linked to the 2017 law on the fight against money laundering: “such as verifying the customer’s identity, their banking details, their player account, this also concerns the monitoring of all transactions, their gaming behavior and various elements which could prove suspicious such as the frequency of visits, the client’s state of wealth etc. And the operator has the obligation to report possible suspicious elements to the CTIF. The National Lottery, too, can report facts to the CTIF.
According to the 2023 CTIF report, we can point out the fact that the information coming from banks seems to be more numerous than that coming from gaming companies. 40,000 reports of suspected money laundering submitted by credit institutions, 25,000 by payment institutions, compared to 322 reports from gaming establishments. When the CTIF has serious indications of money laundering or terrorist financing, it transmits its results to the courts. For 2023, 2 files were thus sent to the courts based on information from gaming companies.
According to information that we were able to cross-check, the legal case concerning Didier Reynders would have started on the basis of a declaration of suspicion from the banking world to the CTIF and a denunciation of the National Lottery to the courts. Note that the current investigation also focuses on the origin of the cash circulating in this case, the principle of laundering being to give a legitimate origin to money obtained illegally.
Let us point out that, as the Brussels Public Prosecutor’s Office points out regarding the investigation into Didier Reynders, that, even if there were searches and hearings, the presumption of innocence fully applies. For the moment, neither the courts, nor the National Lottery, nor the CTIF, nor Didier Reynders or his advisors have wished to react.
