US authorities on Thursday moved to seize another $540 million in assets allegedly stolen in the 1MDB fraud and used to fund extravagant spending, the Justice Department announced.
“Today’s complaints reveal another chapter of this multi-year, multi-billion-dollar fraud scheme, bringing the total identified stolen proceeds to $4.5 billion,” acting US Assistant Attorney-General Kenneth Blanco said in a statement.
French bank watchdog ACPR said it had fined BNP Paribas €10 million for inadequate anti-money laundering controls.
Reuters reports that the penalty followed a 2015 inspection of the bank which revealed a number of shortcomings in its provisions for preventing money laundering and financing of terrorism, ACPR said in a statement. And it found that the bank dragged its feet in implementing an overhaul of its operations that it had officially decided to implement in 2013.
A Spanish court is probing seven former executives of HSBC’s private Swiss bank on suspicion of money laundering following an investigation of documents in the ‘Swissleaks’ scandal on bank-supported tax evasion, legal sources have said.
In an order dated January but not published until now, the National High Court named seven persons under suspicion of "persistent money laundering and criminal association" who in 2006 and 2007 held senior positions at the Swiss subsidiary of HSBC.
According to a court document released on Thursday, the suspects include two former heads of HSBC private banking operations, Christopher Meares and Clive Bannister. HSBC declined to comment.
Predicting and acting upon financial fraud is one of the prime areas of application of advanced big data techniques like machine learning (ML). There are many different types of fraud related to the financial industry. The Laundromat is a case of money laundering (MLA), which is estimated to generate about US$300 billion in illicit proceeds annually in the US alone.
MLA has more than financial impact, as it is associated with activities ranging from trafficking people and drugs to terrorism and corruption. It’s no wonder then that governments around the world are trying to crack down on MLA by means of regulation on financial institutions.
Mexican prosecutors say that Tomás Yarrington, the 59-year-old former governor of Mexico’s north-eastern state of Tamaulipas, had been wanted by authorities for nearly five years and has been detained by police in Florence, Italy, according to Mexico’s attorney-general’s office. He is expected to be extradited to Mexico within days. The attorney general’s office said Sunday that ex-Gov. Tomas Yarrington is accused in Mexico of money laundering and organized crime.
Swiss financial body FINMA said on Tuesday it had discontinued its investigation into UBS Group in connection with Malaysia’s scandal-tainted 1MDB fund. "FINMA recently discontinued its investigation into UBS. FINMA found no systematic, serious misconduct, but sent the bank a written reprimand," the swiss watchdog wrote in a statement following its annual media conference.
Three cases remain unresolved, Finma added in a statement. A case against UBS was closed recently and the bank, Switzerland’s largest, was reprimanded with no further action to be taken, the watchdog said.
The EU’s fight against tax evasion is far from over. After a series of tax evasion scandals concerning European countries and companies in recent years, the NGO Oxfam on Monday published a 52-page report, which estimates €25 billion of banker money ended up in tax havens in 2015.
It means fewer funds are going into national budgets to pay for things like health care and education. The report probed Europe’s 20 largest banks and found that Luxembourg remains one of their most profitable tax havens.
HSBC, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds, Barclays and Coutts are among 17 banks based in the UK, or with branches here, believed to have processed almost $740 million on behalf of Russian money launderers with ties to gangsters and intelligence services, according a major investigation carried out by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and Novaya Gazeta, and reported by the Guardian.
The figure was gathered by documents covering the years 2010-2014 showing at least $80 billion was moved out of Russia by an organisation called the Global Laundromat. Investigators are still trying to identify who is behind the nickname, but the task is difficult as the owners of offshore entities that moved money through the banks often kept their identities secret, the report noted, adding the documents include details of about 70,000 banking transactions, including 1,920 that went through UK banks and 373 via US banks.
