BRENDEN HILLS From: The Sunday Telegraph June 12, 2011 12:00AM

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/sydney-nsw/money-laundering-mastermind-jailed/story-fn7y9brv-1226073077977

TO THE outside world, it was a shabby, back-street fabric shop in Cabramatta run by a slight Vietnamese woman called "Boss Lady". But Trang Thi Phuong Nguyen, 55, was trading in much more than cotton and silk.

She was the mastermind behind an elaborate money-laundering operation that allegedly transferred $2 million out of the country. Incredibly, Nguyen honed her skills after a stint with AUSTRAC, a federal government agency responsible for monitoring money laundering in Australia.

Court documents show Nguyen, who over the past decade has been the manager of five legal money transferring businesses in NSW, trained with AUSTRAC in 2007.

Over a 10-week period, Nguyen orchestrated 234 illegal transfers of cash to Vietnam from the material shop in Cabramatta and a grocery store in Bankstown.

She legally operated money-transfer businesses in each shop, but in 2007 allowed customers to transfer cash amounts greater than $100,000 by breaking the money into separate amounts of less than $10,000 to overcome her statutory obligation of reporting the transfers to AUSTRAC.

The money, which police believed "would be used as an instrument of crime", was then transferred using fake names to a Vietnamese agent located in Ho Chi Minh City.

Nguyen was sentenced to five years' jail after losing an appeal in the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal last month.

The court heard that on one occasion a "short Vietnamese woman" asked an employee to split $142,941 in to 25 separate money transfers.

These were made out to a series of false names but were all destined to go to the one location, court documents said.

Another included up to 12 transfers to different names all written in the same handwriting, court documents show.Nguyen marked the broken up amounts with the instruction "giao chung" - "deliver together" - the court heard.

Court documents show she also had agents in Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia who transferred money to Vietnam.