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.

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.