AML

The Internal Revenue Service has lost thousands of enforcement staffers since President Donald Trump returned to office. The cuts are fueling fears, and in some cases, hopes, that the agency’s capacity to enforce U.S. tax laws is diminished.

A French court on Monday sentenced former Lafarge chief executive Bruno Lafont to six years in prison for paying armed jihadist groups to keep the company’s Syrian cement plant operating in 2013 and 2014, in a ruling that Le Monde described as a landmark corporate terrorism-financing case.

UBS AG has won dismissal of money-laundering charges inherited from Credit Suisse over the long-running Mozambique tuna-bond scandal after a Swiss court found criminal liability could not be transferred after the bank’s 2023 takeover of its former rival.

Indonesian authorities have named former commodities trader Mohammad Riza Chalid as a suspect in a second corruption investigation tied to crude oil and fuel procurement, broadening a probe that is renewing scrutiny of longstanding practices in the country’s energy market.

Facebook has become the dominant online platform for illegal wildlife trade, accounting for nearly 75 percent of the trafficking advertisements detected across 61 websites and apps over almost two years, according to a new report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. 

Canadian penny stock trader John Babikian, once dubbed the “Wolf of Montreal,” obtained a new legal identity, secured residency in Latvia, and bought a luxury apartment in Dubai after disappearing from public view following a U.S. securities settlement.

UBS AG said it will not hand over privileged documents sought in an investigation into Credit Suisse’s handling of Nazi-linked accounts after a U.S. judge declined to give the bank assurances that doing so would not expose it to new legal claims.

Chilean authorities uncovered organized criminal networks that investigators say stole, processed, and shipped copper on a vast scale to Peru and China, exposing a trade worth an estimated 817 billion pesos, or about $917 million, between 2020 and 2025.

A Mexican national pleaded guilty to participating in a two-year, multimillion-dollar black-market peso exchange conspiracy that laundered drug trafficking proceeds through Texas to Mexico, the U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday. 

A sprawling scam compound on Cambodia’s border with Thailand housed an estimated 10,000 workers and included offices, dormitories, villas, and restaurants, underscoring the industrial scale of Southeast Asia’s cyberfraud industry.