%0 Thesis
%9 Master
%A Meinardi, Martine
%D 2023
%F theses_frw:4382
%P 45
%T The signals of money laundering and tax fraud through offshore residential real estate purchases
%U https://frw.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/4382/
%X This thesis quantitatively investigates the relationship between the use of a secrecy jurisdiction by a commercial offshore investor and whether or not the Dutch housing unit purchase is part of a portfolio transaction. The aim of this study is to identify money laundering signals for data extraction that can be applied to variables in a dataset in case the government designates the Dutch Land Registry as an authority required to adhere to the guidelines of the Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Prevention Act (Wwft), alongside their duty to register property purchases. Existing literature reports a qualitative relationship between the use of a secrecy jurisdiction and mispricing. Concealing the price of property is possible through a portfolio transaction in which the price per property is not stated in the Dutch deed. To conduct analyses, a micro dataset from the Dutch Land Registry is used with information derived from deeds of every residential housing unit in the Netherlands acquired by commercial companies from a jurisdiction outside the Netherlands between 2010 and 2022. The results of the exploratory analysis show that 88% of the purchased housing units in the dataset are part of a portfolio transaction, and 3.2% of the housing units are purchased through a secrecy jurisdiction. At a housing unit level, the results of a binary logistic regression analysis show a negative relation between the use of a secrecy jurisdiction and the housing unit being part of a portfolio transaction. Further research is required to further define money laundering signals.