The Justice Department announced today the filing of civil forfeiture complaints seeking the forfeiture and recovery of approximately $38 million in assets allegedly associated with an international conspiracy to launder funds misappropriated from 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund.  Combined with civil forfeiture complaints filed in July 2016 seeking more than $1 […]

A court in the Maldives ordered the arrest and detention on Monday of the former president, Abdulla Yameen, on suspicion of money laundering. Yameen, who drew the Indian Ocean island country closer to China during his rule, is accused of receiving $1 million of government money through a private company, SOF Private Limited, which has […]

Kleptocracy and grand corruption are now under scrutiny as never before. With renewed global attention on these abuses, a relatively clear picture has emerged of the domestic political economies shaped by kleptocratic rule. Analysts have shown how state institutions are set up to allow elites and their families to systematically loot, while protecting these elites […]

Trouble at the top: why high-scoring countries aren’t corruption-free Denmark, which tops the list this year, has recently been rocked by the money-laundering scandal surrounding Danske Bank, its biggest lender, among other corruption cases. About US$230 billion of suspicious transactions are thought to have passed through Danske Bank’s Estonian branch, which has been linked to the Russian Laundromat and Azerbaijani […]

The 2018 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) released today by Transparency International reveals that the continued failure of most countries to significantly control corruption is contributing to a crisis of democracy around the world. “With many democratic institutions under threat across the globe – often by leaders with authoritarian or populist tendencies – we need to […]

Billions of pounds have been laundered through the City of London, despite Britain remaining one of the safest and cleanest places in the world to do business, the home secretary has said. Amber Rudd issued the warning as she announced plans for a new national economic crime centre, with the power to task the Serious Fraud […]

Clamping down on high-end money laundering should be top of the enforcement agenda, says Claire Shaw. Better co-ordination & information sharing will feed into a more informed enforcement picture in the future. The dearth of UK prosecutions for money laundering offences has been widely discussed in recent times, both in government circles and in the […]

On page 232 of ING Bank’s 2016 annual report, the company admitted it was “the subject of criminal investigations by Dutch authorities regarding various requirements related to the on-boarding of clients, money laundering, and corrupt practices.” It added that the bank has received related information requests from U.S. authorities and that it is “cooperating with […]