CTF

The Democratic Republic of Congo will begin restricting cash transactions in U.S. dollars from next April in an effort to curb money laundering, strengthen oversight of the financial system, and rebuild confidence in the Congolese franc.

Sweden’s Supreme Court has acquitted former Swedbank chief executive Birgitte Bonnesen, overturning the only prison conviction handed to a senior Nordic banker in connection with one of Europe’s biggest money-laundering scandals.

The European Union’s new anti-money-laundering (AML) supervisor on Thursday launched two consultations on draft rules intended to tighten how companies assess their financial-crime risks and apply compliance controls across corporate groups. 

The U.S. Treasury imposed a fresh round of Iran-related sanctions on Wednesday, targeting what it described as the illicit oil-shipping empire of Iranian magnate Mohammad Hossein Shamkhani and a Hezbollah-linked oil-for-gold laundering network tied to Venezuela. 

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.

The U.S. Treasury Department on Wednesday proposed new anti-money-laundering and sanctions-compliance rules for permitted payment stablecoin issuers, marking a major step in implementing the 2025 GENIUS Act and expanding federal oversight of the sector.

The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) on Tuesday proposed a broad rewrite of anti-money-laundering and counterterrorism-financing rules that would shift the focus of compliance from technical box-checking to whether a financial institution’s controls are actually effective. 

Ten years after the Panama Papers exposed the offshore financial system exploited by tax cheats and criminals around the world, prosecutions and transparency reforms tied to the landmark investigation are still unfolding.

The British Virgin Islands has opened part of its long-guarded corporate registry to outside scrutiny, but anti-corruption advocates say the new transparency rules contain loopholes that could let bad actors hide ownership information and undermine investigations.

Rwanda has threatened to withdraw its troops from northern Mozambique, where they have spent the past five years containing Islamic State-linked militants, after the U.S. imposed sanctions on Kigali over its alleged support for the M23 insurgency in neighboring Congo.