Law Enforcement

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.

U.S. officials on Wednesday struck at Southeast Asian scam compounds defrauding Americans and a global fentanyl supply chain, announcing criminal charges, sanctions, and the seizure of hundreds of fraudulent websites in a pair of coordinated enforcement actions.

The founder of a Newnan, Georgia-based lender that marketed faith-based investments to conservative audiences was charged with felony wire fraud on Thursday, escalating a civil fraud case into a criminal prosecution nearly a year after regulators shuttered what they described as a $140 million Ponzi scheme.

A Moldovan court on Wednesday sentenced oligarch and former political leader Vladimir Plahotniuc to 19 years in prison for his role in a massive bank fraud scheme that siphoned funds from three lenders in 2014.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and other UK authorities shut down eight sites across London as part of a crackdown on illegal peer-to-peer crypto trading, the agency announced on Wednesday. 

The U.S. Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on charges that the civil-rights organization fraudulently paid informants inside extremist groups and concealed those payments with bank accounts opened for nonexistent companies. 

Sweden’s Supreme Court has acquitted former Swedbank chief executive Birgitte Bonnesen, overturning the only prison conviction handed to a senior Nordic banker in connection with one of Europe’s biggest money-laundering scandals.