Sanctions Evasion

Iran has launched a bitcoin-backed insurance service for shipping companies seeking to transit the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran’s largest cryptocurrency exchange has moved billions of dollars across two blockchains whose founders are among the most prominent backers of a digital currency venture co-founded by U.S. President Donald Trump and his family.

Indian conglomerate Adani Enterprises Ltd. has agreed to pay $275 million to settle U.S. allegations that it imported Iranian liquefied petroleum gas through a Dubai-based middleman while routing dollar payments through American banks, OFAC disclosed on Monday.

The U.S. Treasury Department on Monday issued an alert urging financial institutions to step up their detection of money laundering, sanctions evasion, and digital-asset transfers tied to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has removed Singapore from its enhanced follow-up list but the city-state’s beneficial-ownership safeguards, money-laundering prosecutions, and proliferation-financing controls are still falling short of the risks it faces as one of the world’s largest financial centers.

Small, little-known Chinese companies are openly marketing and shipping engines, batteries, fiber-optic cables, and other dual-use components to Iranian and Russian drone factories despite U.S. sanctions.

Lawyers for Bittrex, the shuttered U.S. cryptocurrency exchange that paid $24 million to settle a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit in 2023, are asking a federal judge to throw out the agreement and order the agency to return the money.

China has for the first time invoked a law targeting companies that comply with foreign sanctions Beijing rejects, escalating its pushback against U.S. blacklisting of several oil refineries over purchases of Iranian crude.

Iran’s largest cryptocurrency exchange was founded and is controlled by two brothers from the Kharrazi family, one of the Islamic Republic’s most influential clerical dynasties and now closely tied to new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.

Russia has emerged as Syria’s dominant oil supplier, with shipments rising about 75 percent to roughly 60,000 barrels per day this year despite Damascus’s pivot toward the West and lingering public anger over Moscow’s military backing of ousted leader Bashar al-Assad.