Geographic

Hong Kong has surpassed Switzerland as the world’s largest cross-border wealth-management center for the first time, driven by a surge of investment from mainland China.

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have jointly concluded that deliberate de-risking campaigns by traditional Baltic banks have driven large-scale client migration toward Lithuanian fintech firms, concentrating money laundering risk in a single digital institution.

Erebor Bank, a startup backed by billionaire Peter Thiel, has pitched senior Venezuelan officials on restoring the sanctioned country’s access to the U.S. financial system.

Financial-crime authorities across the Middle East and North Africa hold powers that look adequate on paper but fail in practice, with anti-corruption agencies unable to freeze assets, prosecutors acting as political gatekeepers, and high-risk sectors filing almost no suspicious activity reports.

Multiple major German banks have abruptly frozen the accounts of Russian and Belarusian nationals living in Germany, demanding fresh proof of residency and leaving long-term customers without access to their money.

President Donald Trump on Friday signed an executive order authorizing penalties against foreign banks and other companies anywhere in the world that do business with the Cuban government. 

South American governments are deploying soldiers, drones, sniffer dogs, artificial intelligence, and expanded port surveillance to try to stem a record flow of cocaine, but the crackdown is having little impact as traffickers change up routes and tactics.

Chilean authorities uncovered organized criminal networks that investigators say stole, processed, and shipped copper on a vast scale to Peru and China, exposing a trade worth an estimated 817 billion pesos, or about $917 million, between 2020 and 2025.

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.