Covered Institutions

Two criminal trials opening in Madrid this week have put renewed focus on allegations of kickbacks, illicit party financing, and broader political corruption in Spain.

Three Polymarket accounts made about $611,000 betting on a U.S.-Iran ceasefire before President Donald Trump’s conditional ceasefire announcement, according to a Decrypt report citing blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps, in trades that renewed scrutiny of possible insider activity on prediction markets.

The U.S. Treasury Department on Wednesday proposed new anti-money-laundering and sanctions-compliance rules for permitted payment stablecoin issuers, marking a major step in implementing the 2025 GENIUS Act and expanding federal oversight of the sector.

The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) on Tuesday proposed a broad rewrite of anti-money-laundering and counterterrorism-financing rules that would shift the focus of compliance from technical box-checking to whether a financial institution’s controls are actually effective. 

China has helped Iran blunt the impact of U.S. sanctions over the past five years by buying the bulk of its oil exports and supporting a complex financial and shipping network that has allowed Tehran to keep earning billions of dollars in revenue.

Jeffrey Epstein received $25 million in late 2015 for consulting work tied to a U.S. Justice Department tax-evasion settlement with Swiss private bank Edmond de Rothschild Group.

A Georgia-based company has inked a deal with Russian-installed authorities in occupied eastern Ukraine to export coal, chemicals, and metals, opening what Le Monde described as a new channel for Moscow to skirt international sanctions. 

UBS Group AG failed to convince a U.S. judge to clarify a 1999 settlement over Holocaust-era claims against Swiss banks, a setback for the lender as it seeks to head off potential new financial claims tied to Nazi victims’ assets.

Brazil has added Chinese automaker BYD to a government registry of employers linked to slavery-like labor conditions after an investigation into the treatment of Chinese workers hired to help build the company’s factory in Bahia state.

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.