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Britain’s largest retail bank has been fined GBP264.7 million (USD350 million) for breaking UK AML laws through handling GBP365 million from a jeweller, suspected of being a major money launderer. (1)

NatWest staff were shown by the case at Southwark Crown Court to have ignored red flags that former Bradford, Yorkshire, jewellers, Fowler Oldfield, was processing millions of pounds of illicit cash.…

Higher education institutions are being warned they could be a target for money laundering, with fees being financed by the proceeds of crime, including corruption, which might also buy property, cars and other items for students.

The problem has been highlighted in a series of reports.…

A former DEA agent who laundered money undercover to attack the Medellín and Cali cartels has called for a root-and-branch reform of AML, so that its vast resources target the most suspicious transactions and the professional launderers who facilitate them. Speaking to MLB, Robert Mazur, who offered ML services to drug kingpins such as Pablo Escobar in the 1980s and 1990s to undermine their criminal networks, said that many laundering techniques used then are still in use today.…

THE UK’S Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has fined HSBC GBP63.9 million (USD84.7 million) for maintaining weak and ineffective suspicious transaction monitoring systems for six years after being fined USD1.9 billion in 2012 for helping launder Mexican drug cartel proceeds.

Following this major fine from the US department of justice, the FCA concluded that the HSBC continued to operate a faulty automatic transaction monitoring system across its global operations.…

USA FIU FinCEN has sought to clarify ambiguities in how it will collect beneficial ownership information under ‘Anti-Money Laundering Act’ (AMLA) passed by Congress in January, highlighting significant weaknesses in the system, said an AML expert.

While the law increases transparency in US business by creating a new beneficial ownership register, authorising a new AML whistleblowing system, increasing AML fines, and expanding powers to subpoena foreign banks for AML/CFT information, the UBO system has significant exemptions.…

The new National Security Law imposed by Beijing on Hong Kong last June (2020) (1) has added a new dimension to money laundering requirements in the special administrative region (SAR), as banks and other institutions now find themselves required to flag cash movements by figures deemed as ‘secessionist’ under the new law.…

Anti-corruption group Transparency International (TI) has called on the British government to stiffen AML controls for the UK’s booming electronic money institutions (EMI) sector. It has concluded that ML risk red flags are present at one third of such licenced businesses.…

The USA’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has announced plans to impose broad AML customer due diligence (CDD) and suspicious transaction reporting requirements on the country’s real estate sector. This would potentially tackle a major vulnerability allowing dirty money into the American economy.…

Populism, the force that elected Donald Trump to the US presidency in 2016, is not a new creed – representing, as it does, a distrust by the mass of voters of political and business elites. Indeed, in America, a formal ‘People’s Party’, also called the Populists, was formed in 1892 and ran in that year’s presidential election, with some success, gathering 8.5% of the vote.…

Every four years, the presidential US election reminds the world that democracy can work – that even the leader of the world’s most powerful country can lose power at the hands of voters. Sure, there is some repetition – today’s losers in Washington are those who won in 2016.…