Illicit Finance

Canada is moving to create a powerful new law enforcement agency dedicated to investigating and prosecuting financial crime, a step that places Ottawa on a sharply different course from Washington, where the Trump administration has scaled back federal fraud enforcement.

Britain’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) on Friday secured a £10 million payment from defense contractor Ultra Electronics after the company accepted responsibility for failure to prevent bribery, the agency said in a statement.

A federal jury on Friday convicted former Republican U.S. Rep. David Rivera of Florida and political consultant Esther Nuhfer of secretly working as foreign agents for Venezuela’s government in 2017 and 2018, capping a five-week trial that featured testimony from Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

U.S. banks have heard little from the Trump administration about the scope of an expected executive order that would require them to collect citizenship or immigration-status data on their customers, leaving the industry warning of multibillion-dollar costs and the prospect of millions of Americans being shut out of the banking system.

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) placed Austria in enhanced follow-up after finding the country’s framework for investigating and prosecuting money laundering remains weak more than a decade after similar concerns were first raised.

U.S. prosecutors charged the governor of Mexico’s Sinaloa state, the mayor of Culiacan, a sitting Mexican senator, and seven others with running a drug-trafficking conspiracy with the Sinaloa Cartel.

World Liberty Financial, the Trump family-linked crypto venture, announced a deal in November to enable its USD1 stablecoin on a crypto network whose flagship resort project was controlled by two men the U.S. government had sanctioned weeks earlier as alleged operatives of an Asian scam ring.

A German labor court has ruled that Julius Baer Group’s Frankfurt arm wrongly dismissed a manager who had raised internal concerns about alleged sanctions violations linked to the onboarding of clients from Iran and Russia.

Accountants, lawyers and real estate agents in Australia will face multimillion-dollar fines for assisting the illicit tobacco trade under a sweeping expansion of anti-money-laundering and counterterrorism financing laws taking effect on July 1.

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy returned to the witness stand on Wednesday in his appeal against a conviction for illegally accepting Libyan funds for his 2007 presidential campaign, contradicting two sworn statements from his onetime right-hand man, Claude Guéant.