Money Laundering

Changpeng Zhao, the founder of crypto exchange Binance who was pardoned by President Trump in October, returned to the U.S. this week and attended a Trump-backed crypto conference alongside the president’s sons and senior administration officials.

The fallout of the release of the Epstein Files continued this week, with emergence of new details of the deceased sex trafficker’s finances, the launch of additional investigations into suspicious money flows and related sexual-abuse allegations, and the arrest of a former British royal.

Stablecoins have become both core crypto “plumbing” and a key rail for the most consequential forms of crypto-enabled crime, with illicit activity increasingly concentrated in a handful of large, sanctions-linked networks.

As allegations swirled in 2023 that the Adani Group’s yearslong stock rally was driven by insider manipulation, two close associates of the Adani family privately admitted to their bankers that they held billions of dollars in the conglomerate’s shares through multiple hedge funds, according to bank records. 

Belgian prosecutors have charged two people close to former European Commissioner Didier Reynders as part of a money-laundering investigation that until now had focused on Reynders alone.

Police raided the Arab World Institute in Paris on Monday as prosecutors widened an investigation into former French culture minister Jack Lang and his daughter, Caroline, over suspected financial links to Jeffrey Epstein.

Ukraine’s anti-corruption authorities on Monday accused former energy minister German Galushchenko of laundering millions of dollars in kickbacks in a high-profile corruption case that has shaken the wartime government.

Louis Vuitton’s Netherlands unit has agreed to pay a €500,000 settlement after Dutch authorities concluded the company failed to adequately vet customers who repeatedly made large cash purchases over a prolonged period.

Paxful Holdings Inc., a peer-to-peer virtual currency trading platform, was sentenced on Tuesday to pay a $4-million criminal penalty after pleading guilty to conspiracies tied to illegal prostitution, anti-money-laundering failures and transmitting criminal proceeds.

Trade misinvoicing may have siphoned roughly $3.64 trillion in illicit value out of the Western hemisphere over the decade from 2013 to 2022, with annual “trade value gaps” climbing to a new high of about $473.2 billion in 2022, according to a new report by Global Financial Integrity (GFI).