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By comparison, in Vancouver or in Toronto’s condo cluster the percentage of cash deals by anonymous offshore entities and/or “see throughs” or empty laundering vehicles, is unknown. And nobody’s gone to the trouble to ferret out this information.

Using the New York metric, a good guess would be that offshore shells bought half of all the high-priced condos in Vancouver and Toronto. But nobody knows — and that’s the problem.

The lack of transparency is a major global economic risk, according to the G7, United Nations and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This is because hot money is destabilizing countries that are being abused, and creating real estate bubbles in destination countries. The lack of transparency also enables the spread of terrorism, criminality and tax evasion globally.

The biggest losers are China, where US$1.39 trillion was looted between 2004 and 2013; Russia, with US$1 trillion hidden, and many African nations where the outflow of funds is shrinking their economies.

For years, I’ve tried to hoist the Toronto-Vancouver hot money problem onto the national agenda, with little success. Clearly, Canada’s legal, developer, banking and building lobbies are too powerful and making too much money off these activities.

But the reality is that anyone who owns or rents property in these two cities pays a penalty — call it a Kleptocrat Tax. People are saddled with mortgages that are $200,000 or more higher than they would have been if the bubble hadn’t been allowed.

But letting rich people play fast and loose in Canada is nothing new. Billionaires can move offshore and never pay taxes again, like the Irving patriarch of New Brunswick did and countless others. And my first job in Canada was for the guy who invented the numbered company on behalf of his client, E.P. Taylor, who also built the world’s fanciest tax haven called Lyford Cay in The Bahamas.

But letting them turn our real estate into “conceal estate” must stop because it’s becoming a serious social, taxation, policing and economic burden.

dfrancis@nationalpost.com