Money Laundering

Tabcorp, Australia’s biggest listed bookmaker, disclosed that the country’s financial-crimes watchdog AUSTRAC has opened a formal investigation into whether it was complying with anti-money-laundering (AML) rules and properly monitoring its customers.

Hungarian police have opened a misappropriation and money-laundering investigation into the companies of Gyula Balásy, one of the country’s most prominent media and advertising figures and a long-time architect of Viktor Orbán’s government propaganda campaigns.

ING Belgium has agreed to pay a €1.6 million settlement over alleged failures to report suspicious transactions linked to former European Commissioner Didier Reynders.

Money laundering offenses in the Republic of Ireland have surged to unprecedented levels, with gardaí recording close to 2,800 cases last year and struggling to keep pace with the volume.

Denmark’s financial regulator has reported a local unit of Nordea Bank to police over suspected breaches of anti-money-laundering rules and asked authorities to open a criminal investigation, the authority disclosed Monday. 

Thousands of seemingly legitimate UK high street shops are being used by organized-crime groups to launder illicit cash, sell illegal goods, and feed wider criminal networks, with at least £47 billion a year drained from the British economy by the schemes.

Canada is moving to create a powerful new law enforcement agency dedicated to investigating and prosecuting financial crime, a step that places Ottawa on a sharply different course from Washington, where the Trump administration has scaled back federal fraud enforcement.

A federal jury on Friday convicted former Republican U.S. Rep. David Rivera of Florida and political consultant Esther Nuhfer of secretly working as foreign agents for Venezuela’s government in 2017 and 2018, capping a five-week trial that featured testimony from Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) placed Austria in enhanced follow-up after finding the country’s framework for investigating and prosecuting money laundering remains weak more than a decade after similar concerns were first raised.

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.