Transactions

China has launched the biggest overhaul of its cross-border tax and capital-controls regime in decades, threatening three popular offshore brokers with at least $330 million in penalties, vowing stricter bank oversight, and ramping up private pressure on the country’s wealthiest citizens.

Financial firms have improved their sanctions controls but persistent weaknesses in due diligence, screening, and asset-freezing controls continue to drive compliance violations, the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said in a multi-firm review published Thursday.

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have jointly concluded that deliberate de-risking campaigns by traditional Baltic banks have driven large-scale client migration toward Lithuanian fintech firms, concentrating money laundering risk in a single digital institution.

OFSI has fined Deutsche Bank AG’s London branch £165,000 for processing two payments totaling £635,618.75 to a Russian-owned online media streaming company in breach of UK sanctions on Moscow. 

Jeffrey Epstein’s office relied on a dedicated team at American Express Co. to book travel for dozens of women, in some cases arranging sham itineraries designed to help them obtain visas.

Epstein’s Centurion relationship manager and more than a dozen American Express colleagues booked, canceled, and rebooked flights for women whose travel patterns and supporting documents two human-trafficking experts say should have raised red flags.

A tiny New Zealand financial services firm processed millions of dollars in transfers for high-risk clients including a convicted U.S. fraudster, a Belarusian oligarch close to Aleksandr Lukashenko, and a British man later convicted in Europe’s “cum-ex” tax fraud.

Ecuador’s financial regulators have launched a joint probe into possible money laundering at Banco Guayaquil, the country’s third-largest bank by net profit.

President Donald Trump on Friday signed an executive order authorizing penalties against foreign banks and other companies anywhere in the world that do business with the Cuban government. 

A network of shell companies tied to sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska helped finance an Albanian conservative party’s hiring of a former Donald Trump campaign operative ahead of Albania’s 2017 general election.

Canada’s financial intelligence agency has issued a bulletin warning banks and other institutions to be on alert for money laundering linked to an escalating extortion campaign targeting South Asian diaspora communities, particularly in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, and Ontario.