Government

U.S. prosecutors charged the governor of Mexico’s Sinaloa state, the mayor of Culiacan, a sitting Mexican senator, and seven others with running a drug-trafficking conspiracy with the Sinaloa Cartel.

World Liberty Financial, the Trump family-linked crypto venture, announced a deal in November to enable its USD1 stablecoin on a crypto network whose flagship resort project was controlled by two men the U.S. government had sanctioned weeks earlier as alleged operatives of an Asian scam ring.

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy returned to the witness stand on Wednesday in his appeal against a conviction for illegally accepting Libyan funds for his 2007 presidential campaign, contradicting two sworn statements from his onetime right-hand man, Claude Guéant.

OFAC designated 35 entities and individuals it said help run Iran’s shadow-banking system, focusing on private companies known as “rahbars” that move money for sanctioned Iranian banks through foreign shell companies and front-company accounts.

Greece’s ruling New Democracy party has launched an aggressive campaign against European Chief Prosecutor Laura Codruța Kövesi over her office’s investigation into a corruption scandal involving hundreds of millions of euros in European Union farm subsidies.

The United States Mint has for years purchased gold originating from illegal mines controlled by a Colombian drug cartel, violating a federal law requiring that its coins be made from newly mined American gold.

A deepening military and economic partnership between North Korea and Russia is systematically undermining the international sanctions architecture built over decades to constrain Pyongyang, while fueling a conventional arms buildup that raises the risk of war on the Korean Peninsula.

A Spanish court has declared former Catalan leader Jordi Pujol, 95, unfit to stand trial in a long-running corruption case alleging his family concealed as much as €290 million in illicitly obtained wealth in Andorra

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.

The European Union’s anti-fraud office has opened a formal investigation into Lord Peter Mandelson, the bloc’s former trade commissioner and recently dismissed British ambassador to Washington, over alleged misconduct during his four years in Brussels.