Catch of the Week: Interactive Brokers Pays $38 Million for Failures in Money-Laundering and Supervision
Posted 08/14/20
Brokerage firm Interactive Brokers LLC will pay $38 million in penalties to settle charges from multiple U.S. market regulators regarding its anti-money laundering practices, including alleged failures to file suspicious activity reports (SARs). The discount broker has paid an $11.5 million penalty to settle charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission over the deficiencies in its internal controls that...
COVID Fraud of the Week: Washington State Man Charged with Attempting to Launder COVID-19 Relief Money
Posted 07/24/20
On July 23rd, the Department of Justice announced that Mukund Mohan, a Washington state tech company executive, was taken into custody for allegedly laundering money he fraudulently received through the COVID-19 related Paycheck Protection Program (“PPP”). After receiving funds through the program, Mohan allegedly transferred over $230,000 to his personal brokerage account. These charges mark another instance of...
Project Proposes Legislative Action to Protect and Incentivize AML Whistleblowers
Posted 05/29/20
Offshore Alert and the Association of Certified Financial Crime Specialists were joined by Constantine Cannon Whistleblower Lawyers Poppy Alexander, Eric Havian, and Michael Ronickher in developing a proposal to enact legislation that would create statutory incentives and protections for whistleblowers with information about money laundering.
The proposal, unveiled on May 25, 2020, was developed in response to a...
The Constantine Cannon whistleblower team is delighted to reveal eleven innovative Hacks created in response to our Challenge to find ways to harness the power of whistleblowers to stem the tide of COVID-19-related frauds and misinformation. Constantine Cannon’s team of whistleblower attorneys submitted the Challenge to The Financial Times’Global Legal Hackathon (GLH), a worldwide effort to draw on the...
COVID Leaves Bags of Illicit Cash with Nowhere to Go
Posted 05/15/20
Few people may have given much thought to the actual mechanics of money laundering beyond rooting (or not) for Skyler and Walt’s carwash business. Many non-television criminals do, in fact, use otherwise legitimate small businesses to “launder” their money, mixing ill-gotten gains in with legitimate profits. The shutdown of the international economy has thus had a surprising consequence: illicit funds have...
US to Recover More Than $49 Million in Assets Related to the 1MBD Embezzlement and Money Laundering Scandal
Posted 05/8/20
The DOJ entered into a $49 million settlement this week in one of the civil forfeiture cases related to the 1Malaysia Development Berhad fund scandal. The 1MDB fund was created by the government of Malaysia to promote economic development in Malaysia through global partnerships and foreign direct investment, and its funds were intended to be used for improving the well-being of the Malaysian people.
According to...
Constantine Cannon Whistleblower Team’s Top-Ten “Staff Picks” of 2019
Posted 01/27/20
From cybersecurity, cryptocurrency, and “big data” to private-equity backed healthcare, private detention facilities, and the essential whistleblower experience – your prolific and relentless CC WB bloggers have chosen some of their favorite 2019 posts (and one from 2018) – don’t miss these insider-favorite gems!
Your worst nightmare – private data exposed to the unscrupulous – could be curbed...
Malta’s Ongoing Corruption Scandal Renews Focus on Money Laundering
Posted 12/5/19
The tragic murder of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2017 sparked international outrage—and the fear that nothing would be done to discover who was behind her death. This turns out not to be the case. After years of persistence from her family and journalist community, Yorgen Fenech, a gambling, real estate, and energy mogul, was arrested on November 20 for complicity in her murder. He has...
Legislation Watch: Proposed Amendments to Bank Secrecy Act Include Whistleblower Rewards
Posted 10/23/19
Currently in the 116th Congress, both the House and Senate are considering bills that would amend existing law to provide a whistleblower reporting system and meaningful financial rewards to whistleblowers who come forward to the federal government to report unlawful money laundering and other violations of specified banking laws.
We have previouslywritten on the important benefits that would be available with...
The Latest on Cryptocurrency, Offshore Tax Avoidance and Money-Laundering, and Whistleblowing: A Report from OffshoreAlert Miami 2019
Posted 05/3/19
“A diverse collection of the hunters and the hunted.”
That’s how the Wall Street Journal described the OffshoreAlert Conference in 2009. The 2019 conference was no different, bringing together those who work in the offshore industry, the government enforcers who try to stop the unscrupulous among them, and the asset recovery professionals who pursue lost funds. Alongside them were whistleblowers and their...