Illicit Finance

Former Bolivian President Luis Arce was arrested on Wednesday as part of a sweeping corruption investigation, just a month after conservative President Rodrigo Paz took office and ended two decades of left-wing rule, according to the Associated Press.  

Major U.S. chipmakers Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Texas Instruments, along with a Warren Buffett–owned electronics distributor, are facing a series of lawsuits accusing them of failing to prevent their semiconductors from ending up in Russian missiles and drones used to attack civilians in Ukraine.

The Trump administration is moving to give the U.S. Treasury Department’s financial intelligence unit a decisive say over how banks are punished for anti–money-laundering (AML) failures, according to new reporting by The Wall Street Journal. 

Federal police raided the headquarters of the Argentine Football Association (AFA) and more than 30 soccer clubs as part of an investigation into alleged money laundering involving a key sponsor of the game, CNN said.

Mexican federal authorities have taken former Chihuahua governor César Duarte back into custody, preparing to charge him with laundering public funds allegedly diverted while he was in office, according to the Associated Press.

Israel’s largest defense company, Elbit Systems, has been suspended by NATO’s procurement arm and barred from bidding for work amid a widening corruption investigation into alleged bribery around military contracts.

The United States has imposed sanctions on four individuals and four companies it says helped recruit, pay and deploy Colombian mercenaries to fight for Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The UK government is taking aim at corrupt bankers, lawyers, and accountants and deploying new tech tools to identify dirty money as part of a new strategy to root out tens of billions in illicit funds entering the country each year.

The United States is tightening its oversight of the tens of billions of dollars resident and undocumented migrants send home each year through Western Union, MoneyGram, and other money services businesses (MSBs), according to a recent U.S. Treasury Department warning.  

Standard Chartered has settled a £1.5-billion investor lawsuit in London that alleged the bank downplayed the scale of its Iran sanctions breaches and misled shareholders about its compliance controls, the Financial Times said.