Reputational Risk

HSBC and Barclays are facing a $12-billion civil lawsuit involving a now-defunct Jersey trust that has been linked in proposed U.S. legislation to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, The Times reported.

Two Wall Street firms continued to manage a trust held on behalf of Suleiman Kerimov even after the Russian oligarch was blacklisted under U.S. sanctions in 2018, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

The fight against corruption is seen as weakening across the globe in 2025, with “bold, accountable leadership” in decline, according to Transparency’s International’s newly released Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). 

Last month, the dollar-pegged stablecoin created by the Trump family’s crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, reached an important milestone: the total circulation of USD1 exceeded $5 billion for the first time, ranking it among the world’s top cryptocurrencies, according to recent reporting by The New York Times. 

Jack Lang, a former French culture minister and long-time president of the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) in Paris, has resigned from the post after Mediapart reported new details about financial and business ties between his family and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. 

UBS AG opened accounts for Ghislaine Maxwell in early 2014 and went on to manage as much as $19 million for her in the years before she was convicted for helping Jeffrey Epstein sexually traffic teenage girls, Reuters reported. 

Convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein made an early investment into Coinbase Global Inc. in 2014, putting roughly $3 million into the crypto exchange, according to emails released by the U.S. Department of Justice and reviewed by Decrypt.

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.

The Trump administration has granted confidential licenses to two of the world’s largest oil traders, Vitol and Trafigura, to broker sales of Venezuelan crude, despite both firms’ recent brushes with bribery prosecutions tied to oil deals elsewhere, The Washington Post reported.

President Donald Trump’s apparent green light for doing business in Venezuela is unlikely to prompt a rush of corporate investment, even if U.S. sanctions are rolled back, according to recent reporting by Dow Jones Risk Journal.