By Clifford Hwang

After targeting almost a billion dollars, hackers stole $81 million dollars from the Bangladesh Bank, in one of the largest cyber heists in history. The money trail disappears in the Philippines. Although the Philippine government enacted anti-money laundering schemes, the Philippines remain conducive to money laundering mainly due to two laws: the bank deposit secrecy laws and the anti-money laundering laws. The bank deposit secrecy laws, one of the strictest in the world, allows bank deposits to remain confidential, and the anti-money laundering laws, which require disclosures to prevent such crimes, do not cover casinos. Mix in a variety of other factors such as corruption, trafficking in persons, narcotics trade, and high volume of remittances from Filipinos living abroad, the Philippines remains one of the easiest places to launder money.

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March 31, 2016

By Matthew Richardson

The much discussed “Yates Memo” seems to signal that DOJ will now follow the long-anticipated realignment of prosecutions to target individual bad actors over more numerous or more high-profile institutions. This goes to an essentially unanswerable question interested readers might ask themselves: if you want to prevent corporate wrongdoing, what’s more effective, putting fear into actual executives that they might be prosecuted, or hitting the institution with a big enough financial penalty for it to really sting? Put another way, what gets a bigger reaction, taking heads or taking dollars? Reasonable people will disagree, but going forward, perhaps DOJ’s experiment will provide interested parties with some research to consider.

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November 27, 2015

By Abraham Shanedling

The U.S. Department of Treasury announced Tuesday the designation of six companies and five individuals linked to Los Gueros, a Mexican drug-trafficking organization.

The individuals designated included family members and associates of Los Gueros’ leaders. The designated businesses are owned or controlled by the organization and are suspected of being used by the group to launder their illicit proceeds. These companies include a tequila maker and its two parent companies, according to the Treasury Department.

Los Gueros, based in Guadelajara, Mexico, is responsible for transporting multi-ton quantities of narcotics into the United States, and hid its ownership interest in companies and properties for years by using aliases, the Treasury Department said in its statement.

The Treasury Department had previously placed Los Gueros and its four leaders under Kingpin Act sanctions in February 2011.

Read more about this at the Wall Street Journal.

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September 25, 2013