Latvian banking regulators fined three lenders over involvement in attempts to dodge international sanctions on North Korea. Baltikums Bank and Privatbank each agreed to pay 35,575 euros ($40,000), while Regionala Investiciju Banka agreed to pay 570,364 euros, the Financial and Capital Market Commission said Tuesday in a statement. The breaches, between 2009 and 2015, relate […]

Independent newspaper Exclusive: Criminals and corrupt officials from around the globe take advantage of Britain’s lax corporate rules – An investigation by The Independent and the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an NGO, has identified dozens of firms in a global web spreading from Birmingham to Belize. The scam appears to have gone on […]

The Independent is passing details of the transactions to the banks. Mr Sarco said: “We hope our colleagues [at Britain’s National Crime Agency] will uncover what activity took place in the UK, but our main difficulty is that the relevant authorities in the Russian Federation are being less co-operative.” He said he had contacted the […]

Call it the Laundromat. It’s a complex system for laundering more than $20 billion in Russian money stolen from the government by corrupt politicians or earned through organized crime activity. It was designed to not only move money from Russian shell companies into EU banks through Latvia, it had the added feature of getting corrupt […]

Latvia’s Financial and Capital Market Commission on Tuesday (18 June) said it has imposed a fine of 100,000 lats (€142,543) – the maximum fine under Latvian law – on a bank involved in laundering over €170 million stolen from the Russian government. The name of the bank was not made public. The money laundering scheme […]