Congress

A senior U.S. senator has opened an inquiry into Binance seeking records on alleged transactions that funneled nearly $2 billion to Iran-linked terrorist organizations and other entities and payments that helped circumvent sanctions on Russian oil, Bloomberg said. 

Long after his 2008 conviction for procuring a minor for prostitution and just days before his final arrest in 2019, Jeffrey Epstein had his eyes on a palace in Morocco. He wanted to buy it, but he needed help. 

A bipartisan coalition of U.S. House lawmakers has introduced legislation that would order the State Department to add Russian mercenary groups to its list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs).

Two U.S. senators reintroduced a bipartisan bill that would subject informal-value transfers and blank checks to anti-financial crime laws and strengthen the hand of prosecutors pursuing money-laundering charges. 

The United States has warned it could impose sanctions on Algeria over reports the North African country is moving ahead with a purchase of Russia’s Sukhoi Su-57E stealth fighter jets.

A top Democratic lawmaker has opened a congressional probe into the $500-million investment deal between representatives of Abu Dhabi’s “spy sheik” and the Trump family’s crypto firm World Liberty Financial, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Crypto companies are pitching new concessions to banks in an effort to keep a sweeping digital-asset market-structure bill moving in the Senate, with proposals that would give community banks a larger role in the stablecoin ecosystem.

A U.S. senator said late Monday that an ongoing investigation into Credit Suisse’s historical ties to Nazi Germany has identified “hundreds” of accounts with potential links to Nazi-era officials and industrialists, including fresh evidence of the bank’s relationship with the SS, Bloomberg reported.

Major U.S. crypto companies and lobbyists are turning against a sweeping digital-asset bill they had championed, threatening efforts to lock in a regulatory framework while Republicans still control Congress.

Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, is pressing Bank of New York Mellon Corp. for details about $378 million in wire transfers the bank processed involving accounts linked to Jeffrey Epstein, according to a Bloomberg report.