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VICTORIA — The cost of buying a home in B.C. increased by as much as five per cent last year due to more than $5 billion in dirty money from organized crime laundered through the province’s real estate sector, according to a new expert panel report.

Former deputy attorney general Maureen Maloney chaired the panel on money laundering, which released a report Thursday that concluded it “cautiously estimates that almost five per cent of the value of real estate transactions in the province result from money laundering investment.”

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In addition, she concluded: “The estimated impact of that would be to increase housing prices by about five per cent.”

“Successfully reducing money laundering investment in B.C. real estate should have modest but observable impact on housing affordability,” read the Maloney report.

She said actual figures are difficult to calculate — at one point dubbing them “estimating the inestimable” — but that the prevalence of dirty cash and organized crime trying to avoid taxes has distorted the economy.