Sanctions Evasion

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.

A landmark public-private initiative convened by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Institute of International Finance will soon begin testing a tokenized payment platform for cross-border settlements across multiple currencies and jurisdictions. 

Russian airlines have largely defied Western sanctions aimed at grounding their fleets by building a shadow supply chain for Boeing and Airbus spare parts routed through India, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Kazakhstan.

The United Kingdom announced a new package of sanctions Tuesday targeting cryptocurrency exchanges and a Kremlin-backed shadow finance network known as A7 as part of an effort to close off payment routes used by Russia to sustain its war against Ukraine. 

BNP Paribas is asking a federal appeals court to overturn a landmark jury verdict that found the French bank liable for enabling human rights abuses in Sudan, arguing the trial judge misapplied both Swiss and U.S. law.

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have jointly concluded that deliberate de-risking campaigns by traditional Baltic banks have driven large-scale client migration toward Lithuanian fintech firms, concentrating money laundering risk in a single digital institution.

Russian intelligence-linked hackers who penetrated the U.S. Treasury Department in the 2020 SolarWinds cyberattack gained the ability to access email accounts across the entire agency, including staff working on sanctions and financial-crime investigations.

OFSI has fined Deutsche Bank AG’s London branch £165,000 for processing two payments totaling £635,618.75 to a Russian-owned online media streaming company in breach of UK sanctions on Moscow. 

Britain issued a new sanctions waiver on Tuesday allowing the import of certain diesel and jet fuel processed in third countries from Russian-origin oil, even as the United States separately tightened sanctions on networks it accused of supporting Hamas and helping Iran move oil and petrochemical revenue.

Spain’s National Court has charged former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero with money laundering, influence peddling, document falsification, and related criminal offenses stemming from the government’s €53-million pandemic-era bailout of Plus Ultra airlines.