On May 7, 2026, four Australian women and their nine children arrived in Australia from Syrian camps in hopes of repatriation.  Three of the women were arrested upon arrival. 

               On May 18, 2026, Venezuela’s former Minister of Industry and National Production appeared in court in the Southern District of Florida to answer charges of his alleged participation in an international money laundering conspiracy concerning the corruption and exploitation of a Venezuelan public welfare program intended to bring food to indigent Venezuelans.  The development is important since the Venezuelan government extradited Alex Nain Saab Moran, 55, even though he was a Venezuelan national. 

               On May 10, 2026, the United States Marshals Service (USMS) Detroit Fugitive Apprehension Team (DFAT) announced the arrest of a fugitive on the lam for more than 30 years after accusations that he committed murder in 1993.  In September 1993, days after the murder of his roommate, Rodney Barger, 23, on September 15, Detroit police arrested Richard Werstine, 56.

              In 2016 France adopted a law known universally as the Loi Sapin 2 as part of a thorough revamping of its national prosecutorial functions and in particular its ability to address transnational crime such as corruption and money laundering.  Earlier in the decade, many of Europe’s (and France’s) corporate icons such as industrial giant Alstom and petroleum giant Total had entered into humiliating guilty pleas or deferred prosecution agreements with the US Department of Justice where they paid huge fines for activity with few links to the United States, while French prosecutors did virtually nothing – and did not participate in the payouts.

 In March 2026, the Belgian Court of Appeals found two U.S. advisers guilty of forgery and fraud over a trading scheme employing loopholes to defraud the Belgian government of approximately €13.3 million.  The pair also face a criminal case in Denmark.

               France’s National Assembly and the Senate unanimously adopted an amended version of a landmark bill on April 13, 2026, to facilitate the return of cultural property looted during the colonial era, in a move that signals a major shift in the field of international restitution law.   The legislation, law n° 2026-351, fulfills the promise Emmanuel Macron made during his speech at the University of Ouagadougou in 2017, to make the return of African heritage a priority.  The 2026 law is a direct response to the Macron ordered 2018 Savoy Sarr Report, which found that an estimated 90 to 95 percent of Africa’s cultural heritage is currently held in major museums outside the continent, with France alone holding at least 90,000 objects from sub-Saharan Africa

               In late April 2026, American authorities arrested infamous Guatemalan drug lord and member of the Los Huistas gang, Eugenio Dario Molina-Lopez.  In 2019,a grand jury indicted Molina-Lopez for Los Huistas’ role in a transnational cocaine trafficking scheme, where Molina-Lopez and his Guatemalan counterparts smuggled large quantities of cocaine into Mexico and then worked with Mexican criminal organizations to sneak that contraband into the USA. 

               On May 14, 2026, the United States (U.S.) Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that Colombia has extradited a 24-year-old Venezuelan national to answer an indictment in federal court in Houston for giving material support to a foreign terrorist organization and drug trafficking offenses.  On March 31, 2025, Colombian authorities arrested Jose Enrique Martinez Flores, also known as “Chuqui” pursuant to a SOJ provisional arrest warrant. 

               On May 15, 2026, the Council of Europe (CoE) officially adopted the Additional Protocol to the Council of Europe Convention on Laundering, Search, Seizure and Confiscation of the Proceeds from Crime and on the Financing of Terrorism (CETS No. 198) (commonly called Criminal Asset Recovery Convention). This was done through the decision adopted by the Committee of Ministers at the 135^th Session held in Chişinău (Moldova).

               On March 25, 2026, in a case of first impression United States prosecutors charged an Arizona gun dealer with charges related to furnishing material support to Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion (CJNG) and Cartel de Sinaloa (CDS),  Mexican cartels that the U.S. Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated as foreign terrorist organizations on February 25, 2025.  The indictment is against the owner of Grips by Larry.