Shopping list

Nosy Tarsee was recently pulled aside by a currency trader to fill him in on one of those viral threads making the rounds among high-end asset managers.

The topic is where dirty money gets recycled into clean money, or where cash once stashed in suitcases eventually ends up.

One favorite destination is a luxury condominium. A unit in an upscale tower becomes a receipt that launders itself, appreciating quietly while the original cash disappears into drywall, marble countertops and rising property values.

Another is property inside exclusive villages — gated, guarded and conveniently allergic to public scrutiny. A mansion behind those walls is corruption with landscaping. 

Nosy Tarsee would wager his last meal that more than one name currently dominating budget hearings owns an address there that never quite appears on a Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth at anything close to an honest valuation.

Even more common is land. Not the showy kind, but raw hectares bought quietly across provinces where land registries are thin and local officials thinner still on follow-up questions. Nobody writes blind items about rice fields.

Another favorite is the toys. Bugattis. Ferraris. Lamborghinis idling in subdivision driveways. Then come the watches — Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet and Rolex — because few things convert a duffel bag of unexplained pesos into a portable store of value quite as efficiently as Swiss horology, the art and science of making timepieces.

The topping is art. The Philippine art market has exactly the kind of opacity that makes a single painting worth more discretion than an entire fleet of cars. No appraiser asks where the money came from when the seller is in Geneva and the buyer’s lawyer is very, very good.

Every item on that list is perfectly legal to own and notoriously difficult to trace once converted from cash. That is how asset-based laundering has always worked, everywhere.

So the next time you see your favorite member of Congress and find the fellow upgraded from a Patek to an AP, or breaking ground on an “investment property” in a province he has never mentioned visiting, you may have a clue whether you are being taken for a very expensive ride.