Lenders

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether Iranian oil tycoon Hossein Shamkhani violated sanctions while using a global network of banks, according to Bloomberg.

ID thieves based in California’s San Fernando Valley and Glendale have been using the Social Security Numbers of foreign scholars who left the U.S. years ago to file hundreds of bank and credit-card applications, according to a cybercrime expert who spoke with the Los Angeles Times.

Australian authorities charged a former National Australia Bank employee they allege acted as the “gatekeeper of funds” for a Sydney crime syndicate accused of defrauding “all financial institutions,” according to a Reuters report.

Belgian authorities have officially charged former European commissioner Didier Reynders with money laundering, a person familiar with the case confirmed to Follow the Money. He is not being held in custody.

Germany’s financial watchdog BaFin has imposed a record €45-million penalty on JPMorgan Chase for shortcomings in anti-money laundering (AML) controls, the Financial Times reported, citing the supervisory body. 

The U.S. Treasury Department eased parts of its Belarus sanctions regime on Tuesday, lifting measures on the state airline Belavia and authorizing certain transactions tied to President Alexander Lukashenko’s presidential aircraft, Reuters reported. 

The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned eight individuals and two entities allegedly tied to laundering illicit proceeds from DPRK cybercrime and overseas IT work. 

Brazil’s central bank is changing how capital requirements are calculated for financial institutions following a recent spate of probes into organized crime groups exploiting the services offered at Fintech firms, Bloomberg reported. 

Federal prosecutors examined Jeffrey Epstein for money laundering and operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business in 2007, according to emails from the deceased sex trafficker’s personal Yahoo account obtained by Bloomberg.

Federal Reserve officials plan to shrink the regulatory body’s bank-supervision workforce by roughly 30% by the end of next year, leaving roughly 350 employees in the Supervision & Regulation (S&R) division, according to an internal memo reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.