Montreal money launderer set up offshore company while under criminal investigation

This story is part of a CBC News collaboration with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists examining the Pandora Papers, a leak of 11.9 million files from 14 firms that provide offshore service, including emails, bank statements, incorporation documents and shareholder registries.

As American and Canadian authorities ramped up investigations into rogue Montreal-based money transfer mogul Firoz Patel in April 2017, he boarded a flight to the United Arab Emirates.

A stamp in Patel's passport shows he entered the UAE on April 8, 2017.

Ten days later, he became the sole shareholder in Argus Ltd., a secret offshore corporation he set up with an office in a building owned by a prominent member of the Emirates' royal family.

The trail of Patel's offshore account is revealed in leaked documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) as part of the worldwide Pandora Papers investigation and shared exclusively with its Canadian partners, CBC and The Toronto Star

The Pandora Papers is the biggest journalistic collaboration in history. More than 600 journalists in 117 countries and territories worked together to search and analyze millions of records leaked from tax havens. 

Publicly available American court records show Patel, and his younger brother Ferhan, ran Payza and several other unlicensed online money transfer services that processed more than $250 million US in illicit transactions that facilitated criminal activity, including child pornography distribution, Ponzi schemes, gambling and drugs from 2004 until their indictment in 2018.