Metals & Stones

Spanish prosecutors are investigating whether Madrid-based airline Plus Ultra used a €53-million Covid-era bailout to launder money embezzled from Venezuela through a web of companies in France, Switzerland and Spain, according to a report in El País.

Trafigura Group’s own trade-finance staff raised red flags about its nickel deals with businessman Prateek Gupta more than two years before the trading house revealed it was facing millions of dollars in losses.

Colombia’s Prosecutor General’s Office accused the National Liberation Army (ELN) of running a two-decade money-laundering network that washed more than $225 million (COP 885 billion) in illicit proceeds through a web of shell and front companies across the country, according to a statement cited by Colombia Reports.

French investigators are treating Sunday’s smash-and-grab at the Louvre as a potential money-laundering operation, after four masked thieves stormed the museum’s Galerie d’Apollon and escaped with eight pieces of royal jewelry. 

One of the world’s oldest marketplaces is doubling as a modern hub for sanctions evasion and large-scale money laundering, according to experts who spoke to The New York Post.

Illegal gold mining has grown into one of the Western Hemisphere’s largest and fastest‑expanding illicit economies, out‑earning narcotics in parts of Colombia and Peru and pushing conflict‑linked gold toward U.S. ports and banks. 

A gap between European and U.K. sanctions is allowing nickel from Russia to flow into the United States months after Washington banned Russian-origin metal, according to a new investigation.