BELGIUM - Charleroi: 15 searches in an investigation into compensation-based money laundering

Belgium’s Federal Judicial Police in Charleroi carried out an operation on 29 September 2026 as part of an investigation into suspected money laundering and organised crime.

The Mons public prosecutor and the federal police announced the operation on Saturday, 3 October.

The matter is at the investigation stage. Nothing below is a finding of guilt.

Operation

• 15 searches.

• Nearly €165,000 held in bank accounts seized or frozen, and more than €20,000 in cash seized.

• Eight vehicles, seven luxury watches, a handgun, computers, tablets, mobile phones and other items relevant to the investigation were seized.

• Two people remanded in custody on suspicion of participating in a criminal organisation and money laundering.

Investigators are examining an alleged compensation-based money-laundering scheme in which companies were used to move and recycle funds derived from criminal activity.

The methods described by the authorities include shell companies, straw managers, false invoicing, and financial flows lacking genuine economic justification. The authorities said arrangements of this kind can also involve undeclared work, social security fraud, unpaid social contributions, and tax fraud.

How compensation-based laundering works

Compensation laundering is an exchange between two parties with opposite needs.

• One side holds cash from cash-generating crime and wants that value inside the banking system without depositing the notes.

• The other side, often a business in a cash-hungry trade such as construction, cleaning or transport, wants banknotes, commonly to pay undeclared labour, without drawing that cash from a bank.

The notes are handed over in person. In return, the business, or a company placed between the two parties, sends a bank transfer for the same amount, supported by false or unjustified invoices, to an account in Belgium or abroad. The bank sees what appears to be a trade payment. The cash that would have looked most suspicious never enters the account.

The company in the middle may be a shell with a straw manager, or a real business with part of its activity off the books. A commission is often taken on the exchange. The banked leg is the point at which a firm is most likely to see the scheme.

Simplified flow

The sequence below is a teaching model. It is not a reconstruction of the Charleroi file.

• A cash-crime network holds banknotes it cannot bank.

• A business, or a straw-managed shell, needs cash for undeclared wages or other off-book costs.

• Banknotes change hands. There is no cash deposit.

• A false invoice is raised, and a matching sum is transferred to an account in Belgium or abroad.

• The cash supplier holds banked value. The business holds untraceable cash.

What firms should test

• Thin companies, nominee directors, and a trade that does not match the counterparties.

• Invoices with no contract or delivery, round sums, or descriptions that do not fit the customer.

• Payment to an unrelated party or to an account abroad where the economic beneficiary is not the invoice issuer.

• Customers in construction, cleaning, transport or staffing whose banked turnover does not reconcile with a plausible cash cost base.

• Credits that leave the same day to a small set of beneficiaries.

The seized balances are not a measure of flows that may have already passed. Compensation is built so that the cash leg stays outside the account that is later frozen. A handgun among the seizures is a fact of the operation. It does not, by itself, establish the laundering method.

SOURCES AND RISK WARNING

Risk warning. The operational facts in this note — the date, the 15 searches, the sums seized or frozen, the property seized and the two remands — come from a single Belga report published by The Brussels Times on 3 October 2026. No separate text from the Mons public prosecutor or the federal police was found, and no second news outlet was found carrying the same operation. The description of how compensation-based laundering works is a general typology, not a finding in this file. The case is at the investigation stage.

https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/2344993/police-carry-out-15-searches-during-anti-money-laundering-operation-in-charleroi