Law Enforcement

Money laundering offenses in the Republic of Ireland have surged to unprecedented levels, with gardaí recording close to 2,800 cases last year and struggling to keep pace with the volume.

Denmark’s financial regulator has reported a local unit of Nordea Bank to police over suspected breaches of anti-money-laundering rules and asked authorities to open a criminal investigation, the authority disclosed Monday. 

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.

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.

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.

The European Union’s anti-fraud office has opened a formal investigation into Lord Peter Mandelson, the bloc’s former trade commissioner and recently dismissed British ambassador to Washington, over alleged misconduct during his four years in Brussels. 

The Trump administration’s decision to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug marks a milestone for the cannabis industry, but experts and executives say it falls well short of ending the sector’s longstanding exile from the mainstream financial system.

The Trump administration has cut more than 4,000 employees from some of the nation’s top law-enforcement agencies even as it has pledged to get tough on crime, according to U.S. Justice Department records.