Construction

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Friday called on banks to serve as partners in the federal government’s effort to combat payroll fraud, labor exploitation, and other financial crimes tied to undocumented workers.

Officials from Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau searched the country’s State Financial Monitoring Service as part of an investigation into the agency’s head, Filip Pronin, a suspect in a multimillion-dollar embezzlement scheme.

Britain, Canada, France, and Norway on Tuesday announced coordinated sanctions targeting Israeli networks accused of financing, enabling, and carrying out violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

FinCEN and other U.S. regulators on Friday issued a joint advisory warning banks to be alert to payroll fraud and identity-theft schemes connected to the employment of undocumented migrants, citing more than $2.5 billion in suspicious activity reported to the bureau in 2025.

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.

Brazil’s First Capital Command, or PCC, has expanded from a prison gang founded in Sao Paulo state in 1993 into what authorities describe as the largest criminal group in the Americas, with some 40,000 members and affiliates operating in nearly 30 countries.

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.

Iran has built a more complex trade system under years of Western sanctions, relying increasingly on China, barter arrangements, and covert financing channels that help it keep goods moving even as formal restrictions target its oil exports, banking access, and foreign trade.

Britain’s new Fair Work Agency will target abuse of labor market rules in construction and social care, two sectors heavily dependent on migrant workers, as the government expands enforcement powers to pursue fraud and workplace exploitation.