Risk Management

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.

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.

The United States Mint has for years purchased gold originating from illegal mines controlled by a Colombian drug cartel, violating a federal law requiring that its coins be made from newly mined American gold.

The Bank of Italy has flagged money-laundering risks at DeA Capital Real Estate SGR and is demanding a remedial plan, a new business strategy, and a sweeping overhaul of the asset management firm’s leadership.

A deepening military and economic partnership between North Korea and Russia is systematically undermining the international sanctions architecture built over decades to constrain Pyongyang, while fueling a conventional arms buildup that raises the risk of war on the Korean Peninsula.

A Spanish court has declared former Catalan leader Jordi Pujol, 95, unfit to stand trial in a long-running corruption case alleging his family concealed as much as €290 million in illicitly obtained wealth in Andorra

A network of shell companies tied to sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska helped finance an Albanian conservative party’s hiring of a former Donald Trump campaign operative ahead of Albania’s 2017 general election.

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.