Steve, this is how money laundering works:
you have $20,000,000 in a foreign bank, it's invisible money because it was a corporate payoff to you for helping Exxon get an oil contract in Libya. So this cash sits in a bank in the Cayman islands under a fictitious business name. The fictitious business - under the guise of actually doing business - buys 100 Mercedes. Because what they're trying to do is get the money "home", they import them back to Australia to be sold at their Australian counterpart of their fictitious Caymans corporation. They bought the Mercedes at wholesale, paid appropriate duties, and sold these cars at their various dealerships at cut-rate prices, but not low enough for their competitors to claim anti-competitive schemes - which of course, draw scrutiny. They don't want scrutiny, so they just become the cheapest discounter in the state, but only by a little bit. Then after selling all the cars - at a profit - they pay all the costs of doing business and employee salaries, then the comspirators start taking larger portions of the profits than they should, ultimately taking away from the principal until they wind down the business in what seems to be a honest bankruptcy. They now have their 20mil
of course, we must also remember that usually when you launder money, you expect to lose some in conversion, so maybe you only expect to wind up with $15m or even just $10m, but who cares? you have $10mil.
Rarely do launderers expect to make a profit.. they just want to get what it's possibel for them to get home, under the radar
