TBML

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.

Proposed European anti-money-laundering (AML) standards could place a “significant operational burden” on banks by potentially requiring customer due diligence checks on counterparties that are not traditional bank clients, a trade finance industry body has warned.

China has rolled out tough new rules aimed at countering foreign sanctions, explicitly linking the measures to U.S. threats of secondary sanctions on Chinese banks over Iranian oil purchases and warning that further retaliation tools are likely to follow.

Companies importing goods from China are increasingly using accounting maneuvers, middlemen, and in some cases apparent fraud to reduce the value of shipments entering the United States and cut the tariffs they owe.

A Mexican national pleaded guilty to participating in a two-year, multimillion-dollar black-market peso exchange conspiracy that laundered drug trafficking proceeds through Texas to Mexico, the U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday. 

Trade misinvoicing is occurring at “massive scale” across Asian supply chains, with discrepancies in reported invoice values reaching a record $1.7 trillion in 2022 across developing Asia.

The White House is weighing a new round of national-security tariffs on several industries after a Supreme Court ruling last week struck down many of President Trump’s second-term levies, The Wall Street Journal reported. 

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). 

Panama’s Supreme Court is nearing a decision in a lawsuit that could void a Hong Kong company’s license to operate two container ports at either end of the Panama Canal, The Wall Street Journal reported. 

French authorities are investigating a crude oil tanker suspected of operating within a “shadow fleet” moving Russian oil, after the vessel “Boracay” anchored off Saint-Nazaire, Reuters said citing the French Navy.