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.

On December 4, 2018, U.S. law enforcement announced the unsealing of an indictment in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, charging four individuals with wire fraud, tax fraud, money laundering, and other crimes for their alleged roles in a decades-long criminal scheme perpetrated by Mossack Fonseca & Co. (“Mossack Fonseca”), a Panamanian-based international law firm, and related entities.

On December 3, 1998, forty-four countries, along with a host of art collectors and NGOs, convened in Washington D.C. to discuss the return of Nazi-looted art. Nazi authorities expropriated artwork and other cultural property on an unprecedented scale. During World War II, they looted nearly twenty percent of Europe’s art, or roughly 750,000 works.