Launder money; lose your hand – two judges in Brunei caught laundering money avoid harsh sharia law punishment after taking $15 million from Court bank account and spending it on luxuries

Tweet Two High Court judges in Brunei convicted of money laundering and breach of trust for looting a Court trust account, will not be punished under Brunei’s new sharia law, which involves the hudud punishment of having their right hands amputated. Instead, they are going to jail. In July 2018, the two judges, Haji Nabil […]

Iranian president alleges nothing being done in Iran to investigate corruption by politically exposed govt officials

Tweet The president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, delivered a speech over the weekend in Iran alleging massive corruption by senior government officials, and claimed that over $700 million is gone that was under the control of the Minister of Petroleum, Bijan Namdar Zangeneh, and a further $2 billion is unaccounted for in foreign countries in […]

First of its kind PEP lawsuit? Lebanese lawyer sues Minister of Foreign Affairs for money laundering and taking state assets

Tweet A Lebanese lawyer, Maitre Marwan Salam, has sued the Lebanese Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gébran Bassil, for corruption, money laundering and enrichment from state assets. Massive protests have been taking place in Lebanon for several weeks over political corruption. Last month, the New York Times reported that the Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, had […]

Money laundering things on Instagram … a small warehouse of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash perhaps connected to Canada

Tweet In the last five years, social media has emerged as one of the most important sources for financial crime investigations, particularly for red flags for money laundering, such as identifying patterns of wealth that are inconsistent with income, and in making connections between members of organized crime. On one Instagram account, we located a […]

Growing protests over corruption in global hot spots means increased risks of the movement of proceeds of corruption from PEPs to the West

Tweet 2019 seems to have been a record year for mass protests by citizens marching against national corruption – at least 10 countries have had massive protests in the last few months, many of which are ongoing. Corruption at the national level is perpetrated by politically exposed persons (“PEPs“) who have access to the country’s […]

Iranian charged in $6 billion case with disrupting Iran’s economy by moving money for sanctions avoidance, immigrated to Canada

Tweet Updated 2019-04-14 Another Iranian in Canada alleged to owe millions to Iran Marjan Sheikholeslami, an Iranian foreign national, now living in Toronto, Canada, is alleged to have played a major part of a financial crime case with an Iranian petroleum executive, Reza Hamzehlou, and is on trial in absentia in Iran for disrupting Iran’s […]

Eritean refugees get green light to sue Vancouver mining company for slavery and crimes against humanity

Tweet Late last week, the Supreme Court of British Columbia approved a representative lawsuit for damages for slavery and crimes against humanity filed by three refugees from Eritea against Nevsun Resources Ltd., a BC incorporated mining company (“Nevsun“). The Reasons for Judgment are not the most clear, in part because the litigation involved an attempt […]

Money laundering charge a sufficient ground for refusing refugee protection in Canada

Tweet In a not-often cited decision from 2011, the Federal Court of Canada upheld a decision of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada denying a foreign national refugee protection in Canada for serious criminality based on money laundering charges even though the foreign national was never convicted of money laundering. The facts of the […]

A banker’s update on terrorist financing and money laundering from the US Committee on Homeland Security

Tweet Summary of the Updates The US House Committee on Homeland Security released a number of updates and received testimony on the status of terrorist financing, terrorism and money laundering in the last few weeks with some interesting developments relevant to banks in terms of changes in terrorist financing typologies that should be added to […]

A difficult issue facing the refugee crisis – the fake Syrian refugee

Tweet Complicated Growing Use of Fake Syrian Passports According to several recent news reports, many refugees and migrants entering, or who have entered, the EU are doing so with false Syrian passports, creating what may be the biggest mass fraud of our time by sheer volume. There are terrorism risks that threaten international security because […]