Illicit Finance

Scanned passports and other identity documents belonging to hundreds of participants in Abu Dhabi’s flagship investment conference were exposed online via an unprotected cloud server linked to Abu Dhabi Finance Week (ADFW).

There has been visible discontent with Albania’s government in recent weeks, with protestors hurling petrol bombs at government buildings and calling out Prime Minister Edi Rama by name.

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.

U.S. and Iranian officials are describing progress in their ongoing nuclear negotiations even as both sides accelerate visible preparations for a conflict that officials and analysts now frame as a genuine near-term risk.

Last December, the Trump administration moved swiftly to free former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández after President Donald Trump granted him an unexpected pardon for his 2024 conviction on bribery and drug-trafficking charges. Few would’ve predicted what happened next.

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.

Ricardo Salinas Pliego, the Mexican billionaire behind Grupo Elektra, thought he’d done enough due diligence when he decided to invest $400 million in Bitcoin as the value of the cryptocurrency surged in the spring of 2021. 

Asian trading networks continue to route European-made dual-use technology into Russia’s war economy, exploiting gaps in the continent’s sanctions designations and enforcement, according to new research published by the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong (CFHK) Foundation.

Russia is exploiting a network of front companies, influence agents, and third-country logistics routes to obtain German-made components needed for its attack drones and missiles.

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.