Oversight Agency

The U.S. Treasury Department on Wednesday imposed new sanctions on four companies it said were operating in Venezuela’s oil sector, along with associated oil tankers.

Donald Trump’s return to the presidency has marked a stark shift in white-collar crime enforcement, with federal prosecutors and investigators stepping back from complex foreign-bribery, money-laundering, and corruption cases, The Wall Street Journal reported. 

Malaysia’s High Court sentenced ex-Prime Minister Najib Razak to 15 years in prison after convicting him on 25 charges of money laundering and abuse of power linked to the looting of the 1MDB sovereign-wealth fund, The Wall Street Journal reported.

President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an order directing the federal government to loosen marijuana regulations and accelerate a long-stalled effort to reclassify the drug, a step that could mark one of the biggest federal shifts on cannabis policy in decades, Reuters reported.

Australian regulators took coordinated action on Thursday to address weaknesses in the anti-money laundering and risk-management controls of Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, including the imposition of a A$50 million operational-risk capital charge. 

The U.S. regulator of national banks scaled back some of the compliance obligations it had imposed on Citigroup under a 2020 enforcement action that penalized the lender for inadequate risk controls and data-management practices, the Financial Times reported.

The EU’s Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA) on Thursday published draft technical standards intended to unify how financial supervisors assess risks and how the supervisory body will select the “most complex” high-risk institutions and groups it will directly oversee. 

U.S. lawmakers have voted to repeal the 2019 Caesar Civilian Protection Act, ending a far-reaching sanctions regime that broadly targeted any entity providing goods or services to Syria’s government, the Financial Times reported.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday vowed to designate Venezuela’s government a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” (FTO) and ordered a “total and complete” blockade of sanctioned oil tankers moving into and out of the country.

The UK government will examine the role of cryptocurrency donations in politics as part of a wider review of party-financing rules triggered by a bribery case involving a Reform UK politician, Bloomberg reported.