On September 27, 2022, the Spanish court in the town of Esplugues de Llobregat near Barcelona said Shakira will go on trial for six counts of tax fraud at a date yet to be set.  Spanish prosecutors charged Shakira in 2018 of failing to pay 14.5 million euros ($13.9 million) in taxes on income earned between 2012 and 2014.  Prosecutors have asked for a sentence of eight years in prison and a large fine.[1]

On September 26, 2022, two wealth management subsidiaries of Crédit Agricole Corp. (CASA) agreed to pay more than $1.1 million to settle enforcement cases with the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).  The claims concerned alleged illegal transactions in sanctioned jurisdictions, namely Cuba, Syria, Crimea, and Iran.

On September 29, 2022, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued a final rule implementing the Corporate Transparency Act’s (CTA) beneficial ownership information (BOI) reporting provisions.

On September 28, 2022, the U.S. Senate Committee on Judiciary held a hearing from “Nuremburg to Ukraine: Accountability for War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity.”  It featured a discussion of proposed laws, such as the Human Rights Violators Act (S. 4201), which was introduced earlier this year.  The legislation would establish grounds of inadmissibility for any alien who participated in the persecution of people because of race, religion, nationality, social group, or political opinion as well as any alien who ordered, incited, assisted, or otherwise participated in war crimes as defined in federal law. It would also make any alien already in the country deportable if they fit those definitions. It would formally authorize ICE’s Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center.[1]

On September 14, 2022, the media reported that a South Korean court has issued an arrest warrant for Do Kwon, the founder of Terraform Labs, and six other individuals for allegedly violating South Korea’s capital market rules.[1]

On September 20, Judge Timothy Godfrey of the Westminster magistrates’ court ruled that a British national and hedge fund trader can be extradited to Denmark, where he is facing charges that he participated in a cum-ex trading scam that defrauded the Danish tax authorities approximately $1.2 billion.[1]            

On September 14, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled that France must re-examine repatriation requests from two French women who travelled to Syria to join the Islamic State.  The Court also condemned France for violating the right to return, a principle which guarantees a right of voluntary return or re-entry to one’s country of origin or citizenship.[1]

On August 19, 2022, the United States Court in Philadelphia awarded $84 million to four victims of the Lutheran Church Massacre on civilians during the Liberian civil wars.  The ruling will impose pressure on the Liberian courts and government to enforce the award or take enforcement action of their own.

On September 15, 2022, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) sent down a decision ordering Europol to hand over their stored data of Dutch activist Frank Van der Linde to him.  The decision is the culmination of two year long investigation which also revealed that Europol tried to delete Van der Linde’s data to avoid complying with supervision.[1]

On September 15, 2022, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced resolutions with GOL Linhas Aéreas Inteligentes S.A. (GOL), an airline headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil, whereby GOL will pay more than $41 million to resolve parallel bribery investigations by criminal and civil authorities in the U.S. and Brazil.  Court documents indicate that GOL entered into a three-year deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) with the DOJ in connection with criminal information filed in the District of Maryland charging the company with conspiracy to violate the antibribery and books and records provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).[1]