Investment Funds

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.

Hong Kong has surpassed Switzerland as the world’s largest cross-border wealth-management center for the first time, driven by a surge of investment from mainland China.

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission is investigating a surge of more than $800 million in oil futures trades that occurred moments before President Trump announced on social media that he was postponing strikes on Tehran’s energy infrastructure.

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.

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has removed Singapore from its enhanced follow-up list but the city-state’s beneficial-ownership safeguards, money-laundering prosecutions, and proliferation-financing controls are still falling short of the risks it faces as one of the world’s largest financial centers.

The founder of a Newnan, Georgia-based lender that marketed faith-based investments to conservative audiences was charged with felony wire fraud on Thursday, escalating a civil fraud case into a criminal prosecution nearly a year after regulators shuttered what they described as a $140 million Ponzi scheme.

Unusual bursts of trading across oil, equities, and prediction markets repeatedly appeared shortly before some of President Donald Trump’s most market-moving public statements.

The Internal Revenue Service has lost thousands of enforcement staffers since President Donald Trump returned to office. The cuts are fueling fears, and in some cases, hopes, that the agency’s capacity to enforce U.S. tax laws is diminished.

Brazil’s biggest-ever bank fraud case has left the country’s banking system facing a 52 billion-real ($9.9 billion) bill after Banco Master used funds, asset sales, and other maneuvers to hide major balance-sheet problems from investors and regulators.

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.