Illicit Finance

FinCEN and other U.S. regulators on Friday issued a joint advisory warning banks to be alert to payroll fraud and identity-theft schemes connected to the employment of undocumented migrants, citing more than $2.5 billion in suspicious activity reported to the bureau in 2025.

French judges have formally charged HSBC Private Bank Suisse with organized money laundering and criminal conspiracy in connection with the alleged embezzlement of $330 million from Lebanon’s central bank by its former governor Riad Salameh.

Danish prosecutors are seeking a 6.6 billion krone ($1 billion) fine against Nordea Bank for a series of anti-money-laundering (AML) failures, in what authorities describe as the largest-ever criminal case ever brought against a bank in Denmark.

Albanian anti-corruption prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation into a proposed $4 billion luxury resort backed by Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, and have frozen the bank accounts of a landholding company tied to the project amid widening scrutiny of property transactions at the protected coastal site.

Switzerland’s financial markets regulator published supplementary guidance on money laundering risk analysis Wednesday, flagging persistent weaknesses in how banks and other financial institutions define risk tolerance and assess inherent risks.

Federal authorities are investigating whether former U.S. Representative George Santos engaged in insider trading by wagering on a prediction market about his own attendance at President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address in February.

A March 2025 Treasury Department rule exempting virtually all U.S. companies from beneficial ownership reporting requirements has created significant gaps in the federal government’s ability to combat shell company abuse, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has warned in a new report. 

The United Kingdom government warned it could legislate to compel its Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories to adopt public registers of beneficial ownership if voluntary efforts continue to stall, the prime minister’s anti-corruption champion said.

Panama has enacted a 15 percent tax on corporations without domestic activities, targeting shell companies used by wealthy foreigners to shield profits earned abroad, as the country seeks to shed its tax-haven reputation and exit a European Union blacklist.

Digital money transfer giant Wise is under criminal investigation by Belgian prosecutors over concerns that its accounts were used by international criminal organizations to launder proceeds of fraud, corruption, and drug trafficking.