Reputational Risk

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. 

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. 

Nine of the largest U.S. lenders made “inappropriate distinctions” among customers in politically sensitive sectors, including by applying enhanced risk controls in response to negative media reports, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) said. 

Standard Chartered has settled a £1.5-billion investor lawsuit in London that alleged the bank downplayed the scale of its Iran sanctions breaches and misled shareholders about its compliance controls, the Financial Times said. 

Wildlife traffickers are funneling dirty money through the same financial pipelines used for such illicit activity as human trafficking, child sexual exploitation, and the illegal sale of weapons around the world, according to new University of Waterloo research cited by CBC News. 

Australian authorities charged a former National Australia Bank employee they allege acted as the “gatekeeper of funds” for a Sydney crime syndicate accused of defrauding “all financial institutions,” according to a Reuters report.

Belgian authorities have officially charged former European commissioner Didier Reynders with money laundering, a person familiar with the case confirmed to Follow the Money. He is not being held in custody.

Portuguese authorities are examining more than 20 individuals linked to a Novo Banco SA real-estate transaction after a fresh round of raids on the bank, according to multiple news reports. 

A former director at Trenchant, an L3Harris Technologies subsidiary that develops offensive cyber tools, pleaded guilty Wednesday to stealing and reselling trade secrets worth $35 million to a Russian broker whose clients include the Russian government, Bloomberg reported.