On December 19, 2019, the Estonian state prosecutor announced the arrest of ten former employees of the local branch of Danske Bank as part of an ongoing international investigation into money laundering.   On January 11, 2018, Danske Bank announced it has received a letter from a French court requesting an interview concerning “matters relating to the ongoing investigation into organized money laundering of tax evasion proceeds.”  Partly in response to the Danske Bank crisis, on January 14, 2019, the European Central Bank reached a cooperation agreement to work with the European Commission and European supervisory authorities to combat money laundering.

On January 9, 2019, Judge Lewis Kaplan of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York denied a motion to dismiss a complaint filed by the Danish Customs and Tax Administration (SKAT) against U.S pension funds.  SKAT is responsible for assessing and collecting taxes in Denmark and issuing tax refund to claimants under certain double taxation treaties between Denmark and other countries.  The defendants are U.S. pension plans, their authorized representatives and, in one case, the incorporator involved in creating plans involved in the alleged scheme.  The scheme also involved  payment agents and broker custodians who are not named as defendants.

In January 2019, the Civic Solidarity Platform’s Counter Terrorism Working Group, coordinated by Fair Trials and the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis, released a report focusing on the impact of cross-border criminal justice and security  on human rights.  

On December 20, 2018, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials arrested Luiz Eduardo Loureiro Andrade, who is wanted on an extradition request by Brazil on allegations of bribing officials at Petroleo Brasileiro SA, a state-run oil company, on behalf of Vitol Group, Glencore, and other major oil trading firms.

On November 12, 2018 the Honorable Bernard A. Friedman, US District Court for the Southern District of Michigan in US v Nagarwala, et. al., dismissed criminal charges alleging violations of 18 §116(a), a statute that prohibits Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), against eight individual defendants. The Government alleged that defendants Dr. Jumana Nagarwala performed the FGM procedure, that Dr. Fakhruddin Attar allowed Dr. Nagarwala to use his clinic in Livonia, Michigan, that Farida Attar and Taher Shafiq assisted Dr. Nagarwala in performing the procedure and that the remaining defendants brought their daughters to the clinic for the procedure.

What are the criminal or civil consequences when a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agent, shooting from the US, kills a Mexican national on the other side of the border?

In December 2018, the Inter-American Development issued a report of an expert advisory group on a comprehensive approach to combating anti-corruption and bringing enhanced transparency and integrity to Latin America and the Caribbean.

On December 18, 2018, court documents were unsealed charging Osondu Victor Igwilo, 49 of Lagos, Nigeria in a criminal complaint as the alleged ringleader of an international advance-fee scheme that involved false promises of investment funding by individuals who impersonated U.S. bank officials in in person and over the internet to victims around the world.  The victims were told they had had to make certain payments prior to supposedly receiving their funds.  The defendants allegedly laundered the proceeds of the scheme through U.S. bank accounts and diverted the funds to the scheme’s perpetrators in Nigeria.

Global flows of illicit financing are a universal affliction and continue to vex authorities and law enforcement agencies across the world as insidious threats present persistent risks to the world’s financial system. These threats do not distinguish by geography, and it is imperative that all countries are committed to implementing the strongest possible defenses against illicit financial flows. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region is no exception to this rule, and countries across the Region exhibit the hallmarks of systems that are increasingly determined to protect themselves against the harmful effects of nefarious activity. In this light, efforts that happen at the supra-national level are just as likely to prove instrumental to preventing money laundering and terrorist financing activity as the defenses that are applied at a national level.