Company Formation

The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control on Tuesday issued new guidance warning that sham transactions used by sanctioned individuals and entities to disguise continuing control over assets do not extinguish a blocked interest in property under U.S. sanctions rules.

The trial of Russian businessman Dmitry Klyuev, accused by French prosecutors of laundering proceeds of the $230 million Magnitsky Affair fraud through luxury purchases in France, opened in Paris on Monday. 

Florida shell companies and virtual office addresses are at the center of an expanding international investigation into at least $260 million in funds tied to Argentina’s top soccer authority.

Britain’s government will cap political donations from British citizens living overseas at £100,000 a year and temporarily ban cryptocurrency donations under emergency election law changes aimed at countering foreign interference.

Companies House has removed cryptocurrency exchange Zedxion Exchange Ltd. from the UK’s register of businesses after an investigative report by OCCRP found the firm used a fictitious director and misleading incorporation filings to conceal links to sanctioned Iranian tycoon Babak Zanjani.

An Iranian banker sanctioned by Britain for allegedly helping finance the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) owns a luxury villa in Marbella through the Spanish subsidiary of a UK company.

Kyiv’s assets-declaration watchdog missed multiple red flags in the filings of former Ukrainian energy minister Herman Halushchenko, according to Transparency International Ukraine. 

The UK’s current system of supervisors overseeing the anti-money-laundering (AML) programs of law firms, accountancies, and other professional bodies is failing to take “sufficiently dissuasive disciplinary measures” against those that fail to meet compliance standards, according to a new report. 

Guernsey’s government is weighing new transparency rules that would let approved applicants access information on the beneficial owners of companies registered on the island.

A record mismatch in official trade statistics is complicating efforts to measure how far the U.S. and China have “decoupled,” according to Bloomberg, which cited an $112-billion gap between what Beijing said it exported to the United States and what U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded as arriving.