On May 27, 2019, the Court of Justice of the European Union, Grand Chamber, (the Court) delivered two judgments giving its interpretation of one of the key concepts underlying the European Arrest Warrant scheme based on the 2002 Framework Decision,[2] that is, the “judicial issuing authority.” This is not the first time that the Court has been called to clarify the legal elements of the EAW procedure. Two Lithuanian nationals and one Romanian national are challenging, before the Irish courts, the execution of European arrest warrants issued by German public prosecutor’s offices and the Prosecutor General of Lithuania for the purposes of criminal prosecution. They are accused of crimes described as murder and grievous bodily injury (OG), armed robbery (PF) and organized or armed robbery (PI). OG brought an action before the High Court challenging the validity of that European arrest warrant, on the ground, inter alia, that the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Lübeck is not a ”judicial authority” within the meaning of Article 6(1) of Framework Decision 2002/584.

On May 16, 2019, the U.S. Attorney Scott W. Brady of the Western District of Pennsylvania and Europol announced from Europol’s headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands that a joint law enforcement operation has dismantled a complex transnational organized crime network using GozNym malware to steal an estimated $100 million from unsuspecting victims in the United States and around the world.  GozNym infected tens of thousands of victim computers worldwide, mainly in the U.S. and Europe.  An important feature of the operation was the unprecedented initiation of criminal prosecutions against members of the network in four different countries as a result of cooperation between the U.S., Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Germany, Bulgaria, Europol, and Eurojust. The operation was conducted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania and the FBI’s Pittsburgh Field Office, along with Europol, Eurojust, and prosecutors and/or law enforcement agencies in Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova, and Germany. An indictment unsealed on May  16 returned by a federal grand jury in Pittsburgh charges 10 members of the GozNym criminal network with conspiracy to commit computer fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.  Previously, a related indictment charged an eleventh member of the conspiracy.  The victims of these crimes were primarily U.S. businesses and their financial institutions, including a number of victims located in the Western District of Pennsylvania.

On May 16, 2019, U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr, during the 3^rd Ministerial of the Northern Triangle Attorneys General in El Salvador, announced that, as part of a coordinated law enforcement action known as Operation Regional Shield, President Trump has approved continued funding for law enforcement efforts between the U.S. and the Northern Triangle countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras). In particular Barr said the U.S. will continue to fund law enforcement efforts through a number of mechanisms. These include the ongoing work of the project’s law enforcement efforts, as well as the continuing work of the U.S. Office of Overseas Prosecutorial Development Assistance and Training (OPDAT) Resident Legal Advisors in each of the three countries. They additionally include the FBI’s Transnational Anti-Gang teams, and the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Sensitive Investigative Units, and Homeland Security’s (HSI) work to counter human smuggling and trafficking.

On May 8, 2019, Danish economic prosecutors charged ten former leading employees of Danske Bank in connection with Danish police economic unit SØIK’s investigation into money laundering involving the bank’s Estonian branch. Among the defendants is Henrik Ramlau-Hansen, the former chair of the Financial Supervisory Authorities, Denmark’s financial regulator, from 2016 to 2018, and former finance director of Danske Bank.  The Danish economic police raided his house in connection with a €200 billion money laundering scandal.  The prosecutor charged him with failure to prevent certain transactions at Danske Bank for which he was finance direction from 2011 until 2015. In October 2013, he allegedly attended an important meeting when Danske executives discussed the non-resident portfolio in Estonia, according to minutes of the meeting. Prosecutors brought the charges soon after U.S. authorities requested their first interviews in the case, apparently indicating cooperation between Danish and U.S. authorities.

On May 9, 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the federal grand jury indictment of a Chinese hacking group accused of stealing the information of more than 78 million individuals. The indictment charges Fujie Wang, alongside other members of the hacking group, including a John Doe, with four counts: “one count of conspiracy to commit fraud and related activity in relation to computers and identity theft, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and two substantive counts of intentional damage to a protected computer.” The indictment alleges that Wang and his fellow hackers broke into four U.S.-based businesses, including Anthem, Inc., a health insurance company, alongside companies based in the technology, basic materials, and communications sectors, which the indictment refers to as Victim Businesses 1, 2, and 3. The hacking group applied a variety of techniques to break into these businesses’ computer networks, including spearfishing and malware.

On May 10, 2019, in remarks to the American Bar Association’s program on “Antitrust in the Americas,” in Buenos Ares, Argentina, Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim heralded progress in global competition enforcement cooperation. In June 2018, the U.S. announced cooperation with a group of leading competition agencies on an initiative for a Multilateral Framework on Procedures (MFP).  The initial group of competition agencies that developed this initiative included Brazil’s CADE, Canada’s Competition Bureau, Chile’s FNE, and Mexico’s COFECE.  The joint initiative had the goal of establishing fundamental procedural norms and achieving commitment from participating agencies to abide by these norms.  The MFP initiative combined widely accepted procedural fairness norms, such as transparency, non-discrimination, access to counsel, and judicial review, with an adherence, cooperation, and review mechanism. More than 50 competition agencies now participate in the MFP. On April 3, 2019, the International Competition Network (ICN) Steering Group adopted the norms in the MFP proposal, as well as meaningful adherence, review, and cooperation mechanisms within an ICN instrument in the form of the “Framework on Competition Agency Procedures” (CAP).

On May 7, 2019, the United States government announced Malaysia has extradited Ng Chong Hwa, 46, and a Malaysian national, also known as “Roger Ng,” to face charges of conspiring to launder billions of dollars embezzled from 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), Malaysia’s investment development fund.  The indictment also charges him with conspiring to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) by paying bribes to multiple government officials in Malaysia and Abud Dhabi, and conspiring to violate the FCPA by circumventing the internal accounting controls of a major New York-headquartered financial institution. On May 10, 2019, the U.S. government announced the unsealing of a four-count indictment in the District of Columbia for conspiring to make and conceal foreign and conduit campaign contributions during the U.S. presidential election in 2012.

On May 12, 2019, the National Crime Agency in the United Kingdom recovered approximately £6 million worth of assets, including an award-winning luxury hotel and a £100,000 Bentley from alleged members of an international money laundering ring. The Honorable Mrs. Justice Cheema-Grubb DBE issued the order after three defendants, including a practicing barrister and associated companies, agreed to surrender the assets rather than face a 15-day trial. The consent forfeiture orders resulted from a complex eight-year civil recovery investigation into businessman Jonathan Nuttall, 46, of Romsey, Hampshire.  The NCA first encountered Nuttall’s activities when it undertook a civil recovery investigation involving convicted drug smuggler Amir Azam, from whom it recovered £4 million in assets.  Nuttal structured his wealth so it was in the name of Amanda Nuttall, his wife, with whom he shared a London flat in Belgravia, which rented for £2,000 a week.

On April 30, 2019, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia unsealed an opinion issued on March 18, 2019, by Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell enforcing grand jury subpoenas and an administrative subpoena against three Chinese banks for records of transactions for a now-defunct Hong Kong based front company for North Koreas state-run company.  In doing so, Judge Howell found jurisdiction and, notwithstanding a conflict of law with China, that comity required the Chinese banks to comply with the subpoenas. Between October 2012 and January 2015, the Chinese banks were allegedly responsible for helping move $105,339,483.59 through U.S. correspond accounts.  Banks One and Two are Chinese banks with U.S. branches while Bank Three is a Chinese bank without any U.S. branch, but which maintains correspondent account. Many of the transactions occurred after Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated an entity as a Special Designated National.  The details in the Howell opinion appear to align with OFAC’s allegations in 2017 that the Hong Kong firm Mingzheng International Trading Limited acted as a front company to facilitate U.S. dollar transactions that helped North Korea’s proliferation program network, on behalf of a covert foreign branch of North Korea’s state-operated Foreign Trade Bank.

In a unanimous judgement made on May 6, 2019, the Appeals Chamber found Jordan did not fulfill its obligations as a State Party to the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), as it failed to arrest former Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir when he was in the country in March 2017. However, the Appeals Chamber was divided on whether this should lead to Jordan being referred to the Assembly of State Parties (ASP) or the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) for not cooperating with the ICC. In a majority judgement on this issue, the Appeals Chamber decided not to refer Jordan to ASP or the Security Council. The core legal issue boils down to whether Head of State immunity finds application in a situation where the Court requests a State Party of the Rome Statute to arrest and surrender the Head of State of another State (in this instance, Sudan), which, while not being party to the Rome Statute, is the subject of a referral to the Court by the UN Security Council and, in terms of Resolution 1593, obliged to fully cooperate with the Court.