Wall Street investing in illegal Net gaming

[mandy]

Internet casinos are outlaw operations in the eyes of the federal government, but they look like solid investments to many of Wall Street's largest firms.

Blue-chip investment houses such as Goldman Sachs...hold hundreds of millions of dollars in shares of online casinos and betting parlors, which are publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange and headquartered outside the United States in places such as Costa Rica or Gibraltar...

...It also illustrates the difficulty of policing cross-border activity in the Internet age at the same time electronic commerce and a global economy are creating fast economic partners across national boundaries.

...Legal experts are divided over whether U.S. investors and the investment houses that operate mutual funds could be seen as criminally liable for their actions by providing financial backing for these offshore casinos.

full article: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/bu...cation=rss