In the Netherlands, we used to look on the international “war on drugs” with a certain amount of disdain. Its solutions were prohibition, criminalisation, stiff penalties and sentences; our national ...
ABN AMRO is raising its bank charges for coffeeshops by 1000% to cover the costs of complying with anti-money laundering laws. From January coffeeshop owners who have a business account with the bank ...
U.S. law enforcement officials say Chinese “money brokers” represent one of the most worrisome new threats in the war on drugs. Small cells of Chinese criminals have upended the way narcotics cash is ...
Years of investigations have revealed the intricate money laundering network that turns Moroccan hash into gold in Dubai. Revelations into the dealings of Kaloti Jewellery International Group in Duba ...
Only a handful of the tens of thousands of annual reports of suspected money laundering end up in court case because watchdog staff lack IT expertise. Some 155,000 cases of possible fraud were brough ...
Police in Myanmar this week announced the largest synthetic drug seizure on record in Southeast Asia. Between February and April, security forces seized more than 200 million tablets of methamphetami ...
Europeans spent at least 11.6 billion euros (£9.9 billion) in 2017 on illegal cannabis purchases, confirming marijuana as the largest drugs market in the 28-country European Union, the European Monit ...
At least €13bn is laundered through the Netherlands on an annual basis, with most of the money coming from Dutch criminal enterprises, according to new research quoted in the Financieele Dagblad. Utr ...
‘Taking stock: A decade of drug policy’ evaluates the impacts of drug policies implemented across the world over the past decade, using data from the United Nations (UN), complemented with peer-revie ...
No one knows how much dirty money is rinsed through London, but Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) reckons British banks and their subsidiaries (including those in overseas territories) launder “m ...
European Union nations may boast the world's most stringent anti-money laundering rules, but recent scandals show that criminals are good at exploiting the bloc's Achilles' heel: A patent lack of coo ...
The public prosecution department has reached a €775m out of court settlement with ING for failing to properly monitor money transfers for potential money laundering. The department says between 2010 ...
The Caricom Regional Commission on Marijuana has labelled existing regional marijuana laws as draconian and one which carries with it inappropriate criminal penalties. Indicating its unanimous positi ...
The Commonwealth Bank has agreed to pay $700m to settle civil proceedings relating to breaches of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing laws. The announcement follows court-ordered me ...
Britain’s overseas territories are to be forced to adopt public registers of company ownership by the end of the decade. That’s a step in the right direction – and one many of us have long been calli ...
Rob Wainwright, who will be leaving his post as Europol director after almost a decade, said: “One of my favorite frustrations is on financial crime — the anti-money laundering regime.“ Professional ...
Dutch lender Rabobank’s California unit agreed to pay $369 million to settle allegations that it lied to regulators investigating allegations of laundering money from Mexican drug sales and organized ...
Nearly two-thirds of America’s states have legalised pot sales for certain uses, but the federal government still classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, on a par with heroin. Banks that handle ma ...
A former U.S. manager for Dutch banking giant Rabobank Groep says he helped hide possible criminal activity by clients and is assisting U.S. prosecutors in a long-running investigation of whether the ...
California should use armored cars to transport hundreds of millions of dollars in cash tax payments expected next year with the state's legal marijuana market, the state treasurer said. The state on ...
The pharmacies selling pot were doing a brisk business. After Uruguay became the first country in the world to fully legalize marijuana sales for recreational use last month, some of the pharmacies s ...
Understated and simpatico, former Uruguayan president Jose Mujica isn't easily rattled. Just don't mess with his reefer. That was the message from Montevideo last week when a state-owned lender, Banc ...
The legal sale of marijuana in Uruguayan pharmacies is facing challenges as banks refuse to deal with companies linked to the drug in order to follow international financial laws. Uruguayan banks ris ...
California government, financial and marijuana business leaders met last week in a far-from-resolved debate over whether a state-run bank could be the solution to the cannabis industry’s banking prob ...
With recreational use set to become legal next year under Proposition 64, cannabis sales in the state are expected to top $7.5 billion in 2020, up from about $3.3 billion last year, according to data ...
Colorado federal lawmakers amplified efforts to protect state-enacted marijuana laws and cannabis businesses supporting banking legislation for the marijuana industry. Reps. Diana DeGette and Mike Co ...
Marijuana businesses can’t openly bank and congressman Ed Perlmutter, D-Colo., is hoping to change that. Perlmutter on Thursday introduced the Secure and Fair Enforcement Banking Act (SAFE Banking Ac ...
The Panama Papers, a massive leak of confidential documents from Mossack Fonseca, a law firm in Panama that helped wealthy clients and money launderers for drug trafficking organisations set up anony ...
Documents from global law firm Mossack Fonseca leaked to journalists have linked the firm to two alleged money launderers and drug traffickers tied to notorious Mexican drug lord Joaquín "El Chapo" G ...
EU finance ministers have called for an investigation into the €500 note, amid growing concern it is making life easier for terrorists, money launderers and drug barons. The French finance minister, ...
Families of U.S. citizens murdered by drug gangs in Mexico sued HSBC Holdings Plc, claiming the bank can be held responsible for the deaths because it let cartels launder billions of dollars to opera ...
HSBC is trying to prevent publication of a report on how it complies with money-laundering rules imposed on it by the US authorities in 2012, when it was fined a record $1.9bn. The bank is arguing in ...
The City of London is the money-laundering centre of the world's drug trade. UK banks and financial services have ignored so-called "know your customer" rules designed to curb criminals’ abilities to ...
Congress doesn’t have the appetite to deal with the conflict between federal and state laws that has caused a banking crisis for the burgeoning marijuana industry in Colorado and other states, accord ...
A money-laundering investigation as big as the bank itself ended with a deferred prosecution agreement that allowed HSBC to escape criminal charges and suffer only a fine. This while the US Departmen ...
A top federal official said that 105 banks and credit unions are doing business with legal marijuana sellers, suggesting that federal rules giving financial institutions the go-ahead to provide servi ...
The Obama administration issued guidelines intended to give banks confidence that they will not be punished if they provide services to legitimate marijuana businesses in states that have legalized t ...
This first independent assessment of the global AML system, conducted by the Center on Law and Globalization, appraises efforts to rate countries by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Financia ...
Legal marijuana merchants — mainly medical marijuana outlets but also, starting this year, shops that sell recreational marijuana in Colorado and Washington — are grappling with a pressing predicamen ...
Since the 1980s, there has been a major push in rhetoric and institution-building, emphasizing the centrality of attacking the financial lifeblood of drug trafficking networks and organised economic ...
In July 1989, the leaders of the economic powers assembled at the G7 Paris summit decided to establish a Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to counter money laundering as an effective strategy agains ...
The accusations from Argentina's tax authority that London-based HSBC laundered over $100 million may pale in comparison to that of the bank's US - Mexico case, but they raise the specter that someon ...
Appearing at a Senate Banking Committee hearing, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) grilled officials from the Treasury Department over why criminal charges were not filed against officials at HSBC who hel ...
The deal was announced quietly, just before the holidays, almost like the government was hoping people were too busy hanging stockings by the fireplace to notice. Flooring politicians, lawyers and in ...
A settlement deal with the British banking giant HSBC is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who's ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to lau ...
Last week, managers from Britain's biggest bank, HSBC, lined up before the Senate's permanent sub-committee on investigations. Europe's largest bank ignored warning signs about money-launderers. The ...
While cocaine production ravages countries in Central America, consumers in the US and Europe are helping developed economies grow rich from the profits, a study claims. The vast profits made from dr ...
The book provides the first collection of analytic contributions, as opposed to advocacy essays and black box estimates, on illicit financial flows (IFFs). Some of the chapter presents new empirical ...
"Wachovia's blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations," said a federal prosecutor. Yet the total fine was less than ...
Wachovia made a habit of helping move money for Mexican drug smugglers. Wells Fargo & Co., which bought Wachovia in 2008, has admitted that its unit failed to monitor and report suspected money launde ...