Illicit Finance

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday vowed to designate Venezuela’s government a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” (FTO) and ordered a “total and complete” blockade of sanctioned oil tankers moving into and out of the country.

The UK government will examine the role of cryptocurrency donations in politics as part of a wider review of party-financing rules triggered by a bribery case involving a Reform UK politician, Bloomberg reported.

The U.S. government is threatening to downgrade Fiji to the lowest tier in its global human trafficking rankings unless authorities take “decisive action” against a religious group linked to human trafficking and transnational organized crime, OCCRP reported. 

Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman and other oligarchs are exploiting European investment treaties to sue Ukraine for hundreds of millions, and in some cases billions, of dollars, according to a new investigation by Follow the Money.

The social-media giant Meta has tolerated widespread advertising fraud tied to Chinese customers in order to protect billions of dollars in revenue, even after internal teams repeatedly flagged the activity as problematic, Reuters reported. 

A Russian “shadow fleet” tanker sanctioned by the UK, EU and U.S. continued transporting oil in late 2025, underscoring what an investigation by Follow the Money describes as the limited impact Western measures have had on the cash flow Moscow earns from crude exports.

The Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigations (IRS-CI) division identified $10.6 billion in tax and other financial crimes in the federal fiscal year ending September 30, a rise of nearly 16% from the prior year. 

Nationwide Building Society has been hit with a £44-million fine by the UK’s financial regulator over longstanding weaknesses in its systems to detect and prevent financial crime, including failures that allowed tens of millions of pounds in fraudulent Covid furlough payments to pass through a customer’s account.

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.

A top Democratic senator has warned that Chinese intelligence is still inside U.S. telecommunications networks as part of a sweeping cyber campaign known as “Salt Typhoon,” saying the operation gives Beijing access to the unencrypted communications of almost anyone in America, the Financial Times reported.