On November 15-16, 2018, an international expert group meeting on and preventing abuse of legal professional privilege (LPP) explored the problems and potential remedies to responding to gaps in achieving transparency in beneficial ownership.  Approximately 30 stakeholders, primarily in law enforcement officials and Financial Action Task Force (FATF) officials, attended the meeting.

When Otto Warmbier left with a tour group on his five-day trip to North Korea, he was a healthy college junior at the University of Virginia. 17 months later, he returned to his parents Frederick and Cynthia Warmbier blind, deaf, and brain dead. In the intervening months, Warmbier had spent over a year in detention at a North Korean prison for allegedly stealing a sign supporting North Korean leader Kim Jung Il. At a televised press conference in North Korea on February 29, 2016, Warmbier, under visible distress, confessed to “severe crimes against” the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and claimed that he had been acting under the direction of the CIA. While imprisoned, he had no direct contact with his parents. A week after Warmbier returned home, he died from complications from severe brain damage.

On December 17, 2018, the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia announced the unsealing of an indictment, charging two men associated with former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn with conspiracy, acting in the United States as unregistered agents of the government of Turkey, and making false statements to the FBI in connection with efforts by the Turkiish government to extradite Fethullah Gulen from the U.S.

On December 20, 2018,  Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and other high-level U.S. officials announced the unsealing of an indictment charging Zhu Hua (朱华), aka Afwar, aka CVNX, aka Alayos, aka Godkiller; and Zhang Shilong (张士龙), aka Baobeilong, aka Zhang Jianguo, aka Atreexp, both nationals of the People’s Republic of China (China), with conspiracy to commit computer intrusions, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft.

On December 17, 2018, the Malaysian Attorney General filed criminal charges against Goldman Sachs with respect to the latter’s arrangement and underwriting for 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) in 2012 and 2013.  The prosecutor has charged Goldman Sachs and four individuals, two of them former Goldman employees, of “grave violations” of Malaysia’s securities laws.

Germany’s top appeals court has partially overturned the convictions of two Rwandan men, Ignace Murwanashyaka and his deputy Straton Musoni, who were accused of aiding and abetting war crimes in Rwanda. Their original trial, which was concluded in 2015, was a massive war crimes trial in which the Higher Regional Court in Stuttgart was in session for 320 days over a period of more than four years. The indictment, making use of the German Code of Crimes Against International Law (Völkerstrafgesetzbuch, CCAIL), which was introduced in 2002 to bring German criminal law in line with the provisions in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), was the first major test of the principle of universal jurisdiction. While the case resulted in convictions, it also highlighted the limits of universal jurisdiction in practice. The extremely limited sentencing of these two men initially, and the subsequent overturning of major segments of their convictions, reveal the degree to which a lack of domestic resources and overwhelming international friction to a loosely defined universal jurisdiction have made current efforts, such as those in Germany, largely ineffective.

On November 22, 2018, the OECD issued a statement of results from the 11^th plenary of the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes (GF), which met on November 20-22, 2018 in Punta del Este, Uruguay.

On December 1, 2018, Canada arrested Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s global chief financial officer, on a U.S. extradition warrant to answer fraud charges in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. During a bail hearing on December 7, 2018, John Gibb-Carsley, a lawyer with the Canadian federal Justice Department, told the court Ms. Meng committed multiple acts of fraud against financial institutions and should be denied bail.  He told B.C. Supreme Court Justice William Ehrcke that Meng does not have meaningful connections to Canada, has enormous resources, and poses a serious flight risk, especially since each offense carries a maximum of 30 years in prison. On December 11, 2018, after three days of hearings, Justice Ehrcke granted bail.

At its 3661st meeting on December 6 and 7, 2018, the European Union’s Justice and Home Affairs Council discussed and adopted positions on a number of criminal justice, home and law enforcement issues.