Terrorist Financing

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.

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. 

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.

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.

OFAC designated 35 entities and individuals it said help run Iran’s shadow-banking system, focusing on private companies known as “rahbars” that move money for sanctioned Iranian banks through foreign shell companies and front-company accounts.

The United States Mint has for years purchased gold originating from illegal mines controlled by a Colombian drug cartel, violating a federal law requiring that its coins be made from newly mined American gold.

The U.S. Treasury Department on Friday sanctioned a major Chinese independent oil refinery and roughly 40 shipping firms and vessels tied to what it called Iran’s “shadow fleet,” in the latest action under a campaign Treasury has dubbed “Economic Fury.”

The European Union’s new anti-money-laundering (AML) supervisor on Thursday launched two consultations on draft rules intended to tighten how companies assess their financial-crime risks and apply compliance controls across corporate groups. 

The U.S. Treasury imposed a fresh round of Iran-related sanctions on Wednesday, targeting what it described as the illicit oil-shipping empire of Iranian magnate Mohammad Hossein Shamkhani and a Hezbollah-linked oil-for-gold laundering network tied to Venezuela. 

A French court on Monday sentenced former Lafarge chief executive Bruno Lafont to six years in prison for paying armed jihadist groups to keep the company’s Syrian cement plant operating in 2013 and 2014, in a ruling that Le Monde described as a landmark corporate terrorism-financing case.