SkyCity Launched Plan to Stop Money Laundering

SkyCity is set to introduce new steps and measures to prevent criminals from using its premised to launder cash illegally. This comes after SkyCity’s money laundering charges last year. SkyCity’s legal troubles and scrutiny seem endless as just last month their New Zealand license came under questioning.

SkyCity Set to Introduce Measures to Curb Money Laundering

SkyCity’s decision to bring in steps to ensure criminals aren’t able to use its services and premises for money laundering or any other illegal activity comes after it was hauled up by authorities for negligence and lapses and set to face steep fines in New Zealand and Australia.

At least 2 SkyCity properties, one in Adelaide and another in Auckland, were found to be in serious breach of government regulations and were ordered to pay hefty fines. Its Adelaide casino was found to have violated the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act and fined AU$67 million, along with an additional AU$3 million in legal costs.

The SkyCity casino in Auckland also ran into trouble and seems to be on its way to paying fines to the tune of $4.6 million, though final approval of the number hasn’t come in yet from the High Court yet. This casino was found to be in violation of the New Zealand’s Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act.

SkyCity’s New Chief Risk Officer Calls Failures ‘Expensive Lessons’

The new chief risk officer at SkyCity, Carolyn Kidd, called the casinos’ lapses expensive lessons for the company. She said, “We're determined to make sure that we continue to get better and be better to keep criminals out. We do not want them coming into our casinos.”

Ms. Kidd seems to be the right fit for the daunting task of preventing money laundering. She has a background in banking, a sector that has consistently been the focus of malicious elements trying to launder illegal drug money and pump it back clean into the system.

Lapses Occurred Between 2018 and 2023

It is believed that the lapses at the SkyCity premises in the different cities mentioned earlier happened between 2018 and 2023. There were lapses in multiple areas of operations, including:

The compliance program that the company had in place
Monitoring of accounts and transactions
Customer due diligence

Lapses in completing due diligence checks for customers are considered serious because the law mandates this; casinos are legally obligated to determine the source of the money that a player spends at their premises.

In its report, Australian regulatory body AUSTRAC said the breaches at the Adelaide property had allowed suspect and ‘high-risk' customers to use the casino to pump out millions of dollars over the years without properly divulging the source of the funds being moved and their possible owners.

There were 121 customers that the casino allowed to transact without completing the proper background checks. What made matters worse was that the casino knew that at least some of those 121 customers were ‘subjects of interest’ for the city’s law enforcement agencies.

Court Papers Disclose Startling Details

Court papers revealed the lapses are startling. They included, for instance, allowing a ‘mechanical engineer’ to put together a combined buy-in of over AU$18 million. Such an act was unbelievable given that the buy-in amount definitely did not match the occupation the player listed with the casino.

There was another instance in 2021 of a customer, listed as a ‘rail manager’, putting together a combined buy in worth more than AU$3.3 million.

In both these instances, the casino in question did not deem it necessary to ask the players to furnish details of additional sources of income that would somehow validate their ability to make payments of such large volumes of cash. Both these players continued to play, and were banned from the casino only in 2022.

The numbers get murkier – as many as 56 high risk customers spent a combined total of AU$436 million at the casino, losing AU$45.7 million in the process, which is a little more than 10% of the total deposits.

Kidd Confirms Specialists at Work to Prevent Further Mishaps

Speaking about the steps that SkyCity was putting together, Kidd said that the biggest step was to introduce, by mid-2025, mandatory carded-play across all SkyCity casinos.

Other measures that were being deployed included installation of facial recognition technology and the deployment of 100+ specialists to work in risk, host responsibility and financial crime.