Oversight

The Trump administration eased sanctions on Venezuela’s state-run financial system on Tuesday in a move aimed at supporting the country’s battered economy, reviving oil-sector activity, and stabilizing the government of acting President Delcy Rodriguez.  

The Trump administration has allowed a temporary sanctions waiver on Russian oil to expire, ending a short-lived reprieve that had permitted the sale of some blacklisted Russian crude and pulling back from a policy that was intended to help contain surging global oil prices.

The U.S. Treasury Department on Wednesday proposed new anti-money-laundering and sanctions-compliance rules for permitted payment stablecoin issuers, marking a major step in implementing the 2025 GENIUS Act and expanding federal oversight of the sector.

The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) on Tuesday proposed a broad rewrite of anti-money-laundering and counterterrorism-financing rules that would shift the focus of compliance from technical box-checking to whether a financial institution’s controls are actually effective. 

Britain’s new Fair Work Agency will target abuse of labor market rules in construction and social care, two sectors heavily dependent on migrant workers, as the government expands enforcement powers to pursue fraud and workplace exploitation.

Trump’s crackdown on “debanking” is colliding with a core compliance problem for U.S. banks: the very policies his administration wants to curb have long given lenders a way to cut off customers they suspect of wrongdoing without violating federal secrecy rules.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued Arizona, Illinois, and Connecticut on Thursday, escalating the Trump administration’s defense of prediction markets and arguing that the federal agency has exclusive authority over contracts offered by platforms such as Kalshi.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the top Democrat on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said he has pressed Binance for records over concerns the cryptocurrency exchange may have given Congress misleading information about reported money laundering and terrorist financing tied to Iran. 

The British Virgin Islands has opened part of its long-guarded corporate registry to outside scrutiny, but anti-corruption advocates say the new transparency rules contain loopholes that could let bad actors hide ownership information and undermine investigations.

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) will prioritize enforcement against insider trading in prediction markets, manipulation in energy markets, spoofing, retail fraud, and willful violations of anti-money-laundering (AML) laws, the agency’s new enforcement director said Tuesday.