Tax Crimes

The British Virgin Islands has opened part of its long-guarded corporate registry to outside scrutiny, but anti-corruption advocates say the new transparency rules contain loopholes that could let bad actors hide ownership information and undermine investigations.

The trial of Russian businessman Dmitry Klyuev, accused by French prosecutors of laundering proceeds of the $230 million Magnitsky Affair fraud through luxury purchases in France, opened in Paris on Monday. 

The Justice Department released its first department-wide corporate enforcement policy for criminal matters, establishing a uniform framework for how prosecutors handle corporate cases across the department, except antitrust matters. 

Banks and investors are failing to adequately screen for illegal mining risks even when operating in sectors highly exposed to the trade, according to a report by the World Wide Fund for Nature and financial-crime risk platform Themis.

Referrals by the Internal Revenue Service for possible criminal tax violations by large corporations and ultra-wealthy individuals plummeted follwing President Donald Trump’s return to office, with the agency’s division responsible for auditing big businesses and billionaires sending at most two cases to criminal investigators in fiscal year 2025.

Guernsey’s government is weighing new transparency rules that would let approved applicants access information on the beneficial owners of companies registered on the island.

A record mismatch in official trade statistics is complicating efforts to measure how far the U.S. and China have “decoupled,” according to Bloomberg, which cited an $112-billion gap between what Beijing said it exported to the United States and what U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded as arriving.

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.

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.

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).