AML

Last December, the Trump administration moved swiftly to free former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández after President Donald Trump granted him an unexpected pardon for his 2024 conviction on bribery and drug-trafficking charges. Few would’ve predicted what happened next.

The fallout of the release of the Epstein Files continued this week, with emergence of new details of the deceased sex trafficker’s finances, the launch of additional investigations into suspicious money flows and related sexual-abuse allegations, and the arrest of a former British royal.

Ricardo Salinas Pliego, the Mexican billionaire behind Grupo Elektra, thought he’d done enough due diligence when he decided to invest $400 million in Bitcoin as the value of the cryptocurrency surged in the spring of 2021. 

Stablecoins have become both core crypto “plumbing” and a key rail for the most consequential forms of crypto-enabled crime, with illicit activity increasingly concentrated in a handful of large, sanctions-linked networks.

As allegations swirled in 2023 that the Adani Group’s yearslong stock rally was driven by insider manipulation, two close associates of the Adani family privately admitted to their bankers that they held billions of dollars in the conglomerate’s shares through multiple hedge funds, according to bank records. 

Cryptocurrency usage is surging in the United States. You wouldn’t know that from the number of federal examiners tasked with supervising the industry for anti-money-laundering (AML) compliance though. 

Belgian prosecutors have charged two people close to former European Commissioner Didier Reynders as part of a money-laundering investigation that until now had focused on Reynders alone.

Police raided the Arab World Institute in Paris on Monday as prosecutors widened an investigation into former French culture minister Jack Lang and his daughter, Caroline, over suspected financial links to Jeffrey Epstein.

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) added Kuwait and Papua New Guinea to its “grey list” of countries under closer monitoring, saying both have pledged to fix weaknesses in their safeguards against illicit money flows. 

Louis Vuitton’s Netherlands unit has agreed to pay a €500,000 settlement after Dutch authorities concluded the company failed to adequately vet customers who repeatedly made large cash purchases over a prolonged period.