Two Toledo City Council members recently convicted for their roles in a pay-to-play scheme who had previously been suspended have sent in their resignations to city officials.

Julie Gibbons, the Assistant Clerk of Council, tells 13abc Yvonne Harper submitted her letter of resignation effective Dec. 21 and Tyrone Riley resigned effective Dec. 24. Both Riley and Harper agreed to voluntary suspensions in 2020 shortly after they were arrested on bribery and extortion charges.

Riley and Harper would’ve still been eligible to return to their positions on council had they been acquitted or had the charges against them been dropped, as their terms haven’t expired. Sykes, however, ran for re-election in 2021 and was defeated.

The resignations follow the Dec. 16 convictions of three of the four former council members accused of accepting bribes in exchange for votes. Riley, Harper, and Larry Sykes all pleaded guilty. Gary Johnson did not take a plea deal and is schedule to appear before a federal jury on Jan. 9, 2023.

Riley and Harper’s council terms were initially slated to run through the end of 2023. Councilman John Hobbs III and Vanice Williams were appointed to council during their suspensions. Riley and Harper’s convictions have left the city’s law department to call the appointments of Hobbs and Williams into question.

Source – www.13abc.com

Vietnam has arrested its previous ambassador to Japan on allegations of accepting bribes when organizing repatriation flights amid the coronavirus pandemic, authorities said Thursday.

Vu Hong Nam and other officials are suspected of taking bribes to give certain people priority on flights home for Vietnamese nationals who had been left stranded when international travel was locked down, according to local media.

Nam, a former deputy foreign minister, had served as ambassador since 2018. He was summoned back to Vietnam this past fall.

Authorities have arrested a number of prominent political figures in relation to the bribery scandal, including those who had served as deputy foreign minister, an assistant to a deputy prime minister, and consul general of the Osaka consulate.

The ruling Communist Party’s Central Inspection Committee on Wednesday proposed disciplining Foreign Minister Bui Thanh Son in his capacity as a member of the Politburo, the party’s top decision-making body.

The case comes amid an intensifying anti-graft campaign spearheaded by Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong that has ensnared top party officials and corporate leaders.

Source – asia.nikkei.com

Source – www.usnews.com

A federal judge in Miami on Friday rejected attempts by a close ally of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to shield himself from criminal charges, ruling Alex Saab isn’t entitled to diplomatic immunity in the U.S. and must stand trial on accusations of money laundering.

The legal fight over Saab’s purported diplomatic status was being closely watched by Maduro’s socialist government, which has demanded the release of the Colombian-born businessman as part of furtive negotiations with the Biden administration.

The U.S. in 2019 stopped recognizing Maduro as Venezuela’s legitimate leader, and Judge Robert Scola cited that determination as a basis for rejecting Saab’s motion to dismiss the criminal charges.

He also sided with prosecutors who raised doubts about the legitimacy of several official Venezuelan credentials that Saab relied on to bolster his claim to diplomatic status — and questioned why he never mentioned his purported diplomatic status in several secret meetings with U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents.

“The evidence suggests that the Maduro regime and its accomplices have fabricated documents to cloak Saab Moran in a diplomatic dress that does not befit him, all in an effort to exploit the law of diplomatic immunities and prevent his extradition to the United States,” the judge wrote.

Saab’s attorney said they intend to appeal.

For more than two years, almost since the time of his arrest in Africa on a U.S. warrant, Saab has insisted he is a Venezuelan diplomat targeted for his work helping his adopted homeland circumvent American economic sanctions.

Saab, 51, was pulled from a private jet in the summer of 2020 during a stop in Cape Verde en route to Iran, where he was heading to negotiate oil deals on behalf of Maduro’s government.

He is charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering tied to a bribery scheme that allegedly siphoned off $350 million through state contracts to build affordable housing for Venezuela’s government.

At a hearing Tuesday, Scola pressed Saab’s legal team of seven attorneys to explain why he should depart from the position taken by the U.S. State Department, which said Saab isn’t entitled to diplomatic immunity in the U.S.

The U.S. since 2019 has recognized opposition lawmaker Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s legitimate leader — a position repeatedly affirmed by U.S. federal courts in numerous lawsuits brought by unpaid creditors seeking to seize the country’s overseas oil assets.

Scola likened Saab’s situation to a hypothetical situation in which former President Donald Trump — who hasn’t recognized his loss in the 2020 election — were to issue passports with the supposed imprimatur of the U.S. government.

“It is clear that the United States does not recognize the Maduro regime to represent the official government of Venezuela,” Scola wrote. “Accordingly, any claim to diplomatic immunity asserted by a representative of the Maduro regime must also be considered illegitimate.”

Saab’s attorney’s presented as evidence what they claim are diplomatic notes exchanged between Iran and Venezuela discussing what was to be Saab’s third trip to Iran. At the time of his arrest, Saab was also purportedly carrying a sealed letter from Maduro to Iran’s supreme leader seeking his full support for a planned deal to import fuel at a time of long gas lines in Venezuela.

“It’s like if you were to kidnap someone, bring them to your home and then charge them with trespassing,” Lee Casey, one of Saab’s attorney, said at this week’s hearing.

But prosecutors presented evidence that some of the documents bolstering Saab’s claim — among them a Venezuelan diplomatic passport and a presidential decree published in Venezuela’s Official Gazette — were possibly falsified.

“At best he was a courier,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Alex Kramer said during proceedings. “But being a courier of diplomatic letters does not make one a diplomat.”

Scola seemed to agree. He also found that even if Saab was a properly appointed special envoy, he would not be entitled to in-transit immunity under international treaties and conventions that protect only members of permanent diplomatic missions. Doing so would make a defendant automatically “untouchable” in the U.S. so long as he had a free pass from another country making him the head of a temporary mission, he said.

“To immunize heads of temporary missions in the way Saab Moran suggests would open the door to the abuse of diplomatic immunities in a way that could seriously frustrate cross-border law enforcement activities,” Scola wrote.

Saab’s attorney said they intend to appeal to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which in April heard arguments on the issue of Saab’s purported diplomatic status before deciding to send the case back to Scola to first evaluate the factual evidence.

“We have put forward compelling and unrebutted factual evidence that substantiates his status,” attorney David Rivkin said. “We are confident that, as a result, Mr. Alex Saab Moran’s diplomatic immunity will be recognized and vindicated.”

Saab was initially held up as a trophy by the Trump administration, which made no secret of its efforts to oust Maduro, who himself is wanted on U.S. drug trafficking charges.

But the criminal case has become a major sticking point as the Biden administration seeks to improve relations with Venezuela and tap new oil supplies to make up for a loss of exports from Russia following sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine

The tug of war has been further complicated by the revelation that Saab, prior to his arrest, had been signed up as an informant by the DEA and had been providing it with information about corruption in Maduro’s inner circle.

For months, speculation had been swirling that Saab could walk free as part of some sort of prisoner swap for several Americans detained in Caracas. A similar deal for two nephews of Maduro convicted in New York on drug charges secured the release in October of seven other Americans detained in Venezuela. The Biden administration has insisted that no such negotiations are taking place.

Source – apnews.com

The settlements involve UOP, a U.S. subsidiary of Honeywell that manufactures catalysts used to refine oil. Investigations found that UOP had conspired to pay bribes to a former high-level Petróleo Brasileiro SA official to obtain a $425 million oil refinery contract, authorities said. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission also found that Honeywell’s Belgian subsidiary had paid bribes to Algerian officials to win business with Algerian state-owned oil company Sonatrach.

Source – wsj.com

A court in Maldives on Sunday found the former president guilty of money laundering and accepting a bribe and sentenced him to 11 years in prison.

The Criminal Court of Maldives also ordered Abdulla Yameen to pay a fine of $5 million.

The court found Yameen guilty of accepting money for leasing an island owned by the government. He ruled the Indian ocean archipelago nation, known as an exclusive tourist destination, from 2013 to 2018.

It gave him a seven-year sentence for money laundering and four years for accepting a bribe.

This was not the first time Yameen was found guilty. In a separate case in 2019, Yameen was found guilty of money laundering and sentenced to five years in prison.

But two years later, the Supreme Court overturned the verdict, saying that evidence at the initial trial contained discrepancies and did not conclusively prove that Yameen had laundered $1 million in state money for personal gain.

Yamen lost a reelection bid in 2018 to current President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih.

During his time of office, he was accused of corruption, muzzling the media and persecuting political opponents.

Source – abcnews.go.com

French jet engine maker Safran SA (SAF.PA) will pay about $17.2 million as part of a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department over bribes its subsidiaries allegedly paid in China, the Department of Justice (DoJ) said in a statement made public on Friday.

The Paris-based aerospace supplier will be required to turn over profits from “corruptly obtained” and retained contracts by its U.S.-based subsidiary, Monogram Systems, the DoJ said.

Monogram and Safran’s German unit, Evac GmbH, allegedly paid bribes to obtain “lucrative” train lavatory contracts with the Chinese government.

Source – www.reuters.com

The founder of a California-based porn empire that coerced young women into filming adult videos has been arrested in Spain, three years after he fled while facing federal sex-trafficking charges, the FBI said.

Michael James Pratt was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. Spanish National Police arrested him Wednesday in Madrid, the FBI’s San Diego field office said in a statement Thursday.

Pratt, a New Zealand native, will be held in Spain pending extradition to San Diego to face charges of sex trafficking and sex trafficking of a minor, production of child pornography and money laundering conspiracy.

Pratt, 40, founded the now-defunct GirlsDoPorn website in San Diego. In 2019, he and others were charged in San Diego with sex crimes after being targeted in a civil lawsuit by 22 women who claimed they were victimized by fraud and breach of contract.

The women said they were plied with alcohol and marijuana before being rushed through signing a contract, which they were not allowed to read. Some said they were sexually assaulted and held in hotel rooms unwillingly until adult filming had ended.

A judge found in favor of the women and handed down a $12.7-million judgment against Pratt, Matthew Isaac Wolfe and adult producer and performer Ruben Andre Garcia.

Wolfe, who handled day-to-day operations, finances, marketing and filming for the website, pleaded guilty this year to a federal count of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking. He awaits sentencing.

The other co-defendants also pleaded guilty. Garcia was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and cameraman Theodore Gyi received a four-year sentence.

Valorie Moser, a former bookkeeper for GirlsDoPorn, pleaded guilty last year.

Source – latimes.com

The Justice Department is requesting a decade in prison for “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” star Jen Shah ahead of her Jan. 6 sentencing for running a nationwide telemarketing scheme targeting seniors, according to newly-filed court documents that also feature previously unreported victim impact statements from some of the elderly people she defrauded.

The Dec. 23 filing calls Shah, 49, “the most culpable person charged in this case,” and “an integral leader of a wide-ranging, nationwide telemarketing fraud scheme that victimized thousands of innocent people.”

“At the defendant’s direction, victims were defrauded over and over again until they had nothing left,” Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote. “She and her co-conspirators persisted in their conduct until the victims’ bank accounts were empty, their credit cards were at their limits, and there was nothing more to take.”

Shah’s lawyers and representative did not immediately return requests for comment. Shah’s lawyers have requested a three-year prison sentence, court documents show.

Shah and her “first assistant,” Stuart Smith, were accused in March 2021 of committing wire fraud and money laundering in a scheme in which they “generated and sold ‘lead lists’ of innocent individuals for other members of their scheme to repeatedly scam” from 2012 through 2021, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.

After initially pleading not guilty to the charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering in April 2021, Shah entered a guilty plea to the wire fraud count this past July in a dramatic courtroom reversal a week before her trial was scheduled to begin.

The money laundering charge was tossed as part of the plea agreement, and Shah agreed to forfeit $6.5 million and to pay restitution up to $9.5 million, in addition to facing prison time of up to 14 years.

Smith also pleaded not guilty to the charges in April 2021, but later changed his plea to guilty in November 2021, court records show. Smith does not yet appear to have been sentenced, according to court documents.

‘The burden you have caused me is overwhelming’

The filing includes five previously unreported victim impact statements that were written last month, ahead of what was supposed to be Shah’s Nov. 28 sentencing, which was postponed to Jan. 6 at the request of her lawyers.

The statements shed new light on how Shah and her associates defrauded people and the impacts the scheme had on their victims, which allegedly included homelessness, suicidal ideation and severe health issues.

The victim who appeared to be defrauded out of the most money was a Canadian woman who lost more than $100,000 through the scheme’s unrealized promises to help her start an unspecified new business.

She said the loss of money led her to contemplate suicide, required her to re-mortgage her house, almost led her to divorce, and has left her continuing to struggle to pay bills and care for her “critically ill” husband and 90-year-old father.

“The burden you have caused me is overwhelming, I can’t even really put words to the amount of anguish you have caused,” that victim wrote to Shah in her impact statement.

A 60-year-old victim said she “suffered emotional and physical stress” after investing approximately $35,000 into what Shah’s associates promised would be her own e-commerce business. After devoting more than 10 hours a day to what she thought was her business and not making any profit, she “realized that I was being scammed” and had two heart attacks in 2018, the first of which she said was brought on by “extreme stress.”

Another victim with several serious health conditions said she became homeless after being pushed into nearly $30,000 debt through Shah’s scheme.

A 75-year-old retiree was defrauded of more than half her life savings — approximately $40,000 — through promises to coach her on how to market products online, she said in her victim impact statement. Several businesses under different names began subsequently contacting her with the same promises, and “coaching and information began to be duplicated,” she wrote.

A fifth victim, a widow in her mid-70s, asked the court to “let the punishment fit the crime” after Shah’s scheme defrauded her out of nearly $10,000 by selling her a course that promised to help her “acquire a skill in computer knowledge and sales work.” Not only did the course not adequately teach her how to start her own business, as promised, but telemarketers continued to call and harass her even after she realized she was being scammed and her attorney intervened, she wrote.

“The mental anguish is still with me, today, and the guilt I harbor from being so vulnerable and easy prey to such sharks, still swim in my mind,” the victim said.

‘The only thing I’m guilty of is being Shah-mazing’

In the most recent filing, the feds also allege that Shah “engaged in a yearslong, comprehensive effort to hide her continued role in the scheme,” and then tried to profit off the charges once they became public by selling merchandise claiming her innocence as part of “a public offensive.”

The recent filing also alleges that Shah appeared to mock the charges against her in her tagline in the opening credits of season 2 of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” in which she states: “The only thing I’m guilty of is being Shah-mazing.”

Bravo, the network on which “The Real Housewives” franchise airs, is owned by NBC Universal, the parent company of NBC News.

On the second season, “Housewives” cameras captured the moments prior to Shah’s arrest — which did not occur on camera — and her cast members’ apparent shock upon learning of the allegations against her. None of Shah’s costars are accused of any wrongdoing.

The show featured scenes from Shah’s opulent daily life, which included designer clothes and bags, lavish parties and a group of assistants dubbed the “Shah Squad,” which Smith was purportedly part of.

Shah starred on the show since its first season, which premiered in 2020; the third season is currently airing.

In an Instagram post last week, Shah claimed she was initially told she would not be allowed to attend the show’s season three reunion — which just filmed — after her guilty plea, but that producers reversed course and invited her last month on the condition that she was willing to discuss her legal case, which she said she was unwilling to do.

“That expectation has no regard for me or my family’s well-being; so under legal advice, I will not be attending reunion [sic],” she wrote.

A Bravo representative did not immediately return a request for comment.

Pleas for leniency

In court documents filed Dec. 16, Shah’s family members pleaded for leniency in her sentencing in letters to the judge.

Her husband, Sharrieff Shah, 51, a cornerbacks/special teams coordinator for the University of Utah football team, who is not accused of a crime, pleaded that the judge consider her role as a wife and mother to their two sons; her “civic commitment and contributions to her community,” which he said included making and distributing masks to homeless people during the pandemic and supporting LGBTQ youth; and her “sincere desire to correct her past wrongs.”

Jen Shah also filed a statement with the court Dec. 16 — much of which was redacted — in which she wrote that she accepts “complete responsibility for my bad conduct” and alleged that “terrible business decisions…stemmed from some personal painful experiences that I was going through in my life,” including the 2018 deaths of her father and grandmother.

“My poor judgment and bad business associations caused innocent people to lose their money and be victimized by investing in poorly structured businesses/products that I influenced or controlled,” she wrote. “For that, I am genuinely sorry, and I will work for the rest of my life to make it right.”

Shah also claimed in that statement that she joined “The Real Housewives” to “escape the coaching business” and “have a platform to launch my fashion and beauty business.”

“I hoped that by joining the show, I could restart my life and become someone my father and family would be proud of,” she wrote.

Source – www.nbcnews.com

One of the closest lieutenants of FTX founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, warned Bahamian regulators about improper trades at the cryptocurrency exchange in the days running up to its collapse, according to court filings.

The revelation came in papers published as part of the bail hearing for Bankman-Fried, FTX’s former chief executive, who was arrested in the Bahamas on Monday and charged in the US on Tuesday over alleged fraud, money laundering and conspiracy.

The filing refers to a warning from Ryan Salame, the co-CEO and chairman of FTX Digital Markets, the Bahamian-based portion of Bankman-Fried’s sprawling cryptocurrency empire, about transfers to FTX’s crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research.

On 9 November, Salame told the Bahamian securities commission that “clients’ assets which may have been held with FTX Digital were transferred to Alameda Research to cover financial losses at Alameda”, according to the court documents first published by the Financial Times.

In the filing, published as part of Bankman-Fried’s bail hearing, Christina Rolle, the commission’s director, added that Salame was clear only three people could have made the transfer: Bankman-Fried or his two co-founders, Nishad Singh and Gary Wang. “Such actions may be deemed criminal,” Rolle concluded.

The conversation between Rolle and Salame happened two days before FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US, and the same day that Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange, walked away from a non-binding offer to bail out the company after performing brief due diligence.

Salame has long been one of Bankman-Fried’s closest associates, just outside the innermost circle of the FTX co-founders. While Bankman-Fried built up a reputation as a mega-donor for the Democratic Party, using his newfound influence in Washington DC to push for friendly regulation, Salame was doing the same with the Republicans, ultimately giving more than $20m to various causes within the party.

Those donations are now under the spotlight, after criminal charges filed against Bankman-Fried in New York include campaign finance violations and money laundering offences.

According to the Department of Justice’s allegations, customer funds deposited at FTX were funnelled to Alameda, where they were then used to make political donations in both Bankman-Fried’s name and the names of other un-named “co-conspirators”.

Since the collapse of FTX, Bankman-Fried has publicly maintained that he was largely absent from day-to-day decisions at Alameda, and has blamed the transfer of funds between the two companies on an oversight of a “hidden, poorly labelled internal account” containing $8bn that FTX’s internal records had failed to mark as being actually held in the name of the crypto hedge fund.

But while Bankman-Fried stepped down as chief executive of Alameda in 2021, with his former hedge fund colleague and sometime girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, eventually taking over as sole chief executive the following year, civil charges filed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission alleged that he “maintained direct decision-making authority over all of Alameda’s major trading, investment, and financial decisions”.

The charges add: “This authority was exercised at least in part through Bankman-Fried’s regular, often daily participation in various in-person and mobile chat communications with senior personnel at Alameda.”

Source – www.theguardian.com

A Paramasivan, former director (AMF-II) in the Office of Director General of Audit, Central Expenditure, New Delhi has been sentenced to four years of rigorous imprisonment and a fine of Rs 10,000 by the principal special judge for CBI Cases, Chennai (Tamil Nadu) in a bribery case.

The Indian Audit and Accounts Service was sentenced along with Sivaram Thilagar, then Assistant Surgeon, Government Primary Health Centre,Kanchipuram (Tamil Nadu) in a bribery case. Sivaram has been sentenced to undergo three years rigorous imprisonment with fine of Rs 5000 in a bribery case.

The CBI had registered a case against the accused after the allegations that Paramasivam demanded a bribe of Rs 5 Lakh from a complainant representing  MIOT College of Nursing to settle the deficiencies noticed during the audit and inspection conducted on the records of the Nursing college. It was also alleged that Paramasivam asked the complainant to hand over the bribe amount to Sivaram Thilagar (brother-in-Law of Paramasivam).

The CBI laid a trap and caught the accused red-handed while they were demanding and accepting the bribe. After investigation, a chargesheet was filed. The Trial Court found the accused guilty and convicted them, a release said.

Source – www.newindianexpress.com

Dutch co-operative bank Rabobank (RABO.UL) on Wednesday said it is under investigation by public prosecutors in the Netherlands for suspected violations of national money laundering laws.

The bank in a statement said it was cooperating with the investigation.

The disclosure follows a 2021 warning by the bank that it had been instructed by the Dutch central bank (DNB) to fix its customer due diligence practices and that it was facing a “punitive enforcement procedure.”

Rabobank is one of the Netherlands’ three largest banks. Competitors ING Group and ABN Amro incurred massive fines in similar situations, with ING docked $900 million in 2018 and ABN $574 million in 2021.

“The Dutch Public Prosecution Service has informed Rabobank that it is considered a suspect in connection with violation of the Dutch Anti-Money Laundering and Anti-Terrorist Financing Act,” the company said in a statement.

Source – www.reuters.com

The son of Mozambique’s ex-president was sentenced Wednesday to 12 years in prison for embezzlement and money laundering.

Judge Efigenio Baptista said Armando Ndambi Guebuza defrauded the government of more than $2.7 million, and is responsible for crimes of money laundering, embezzlement of State funds; use of false documents; four crimes of forgery of other writings; blackmail, influence peddling and association to commit crime.

Guebuza, the oldest son of former Mozambique president Armando Guebuza, was sentenced along with 10 other defendants including the former head of security and intelligence Gregorio Leao.

The corruption case came after three newly state-owned companies got over $2 billion in loans from international banks guaranteed by the Mozambique government without parliamentary approval.

An independent audit in 2017 showed $500 million from that loan went missing.

The former president’s private secretary Ines Moiane was also sentenced to 11 years in prison while State Secret Intelligence Services staffer Cipriano Mutota received a 10-year sentence.

Nineteen defendants in all were charged with blackmail, forgery, embezzlement and laundering an estimated $200 million in kickbacks. The bribes in the scandal were paid to several people, including Mozambique government officials and Credit Suisse bankers.

“It is proven that the defendants swindled state funds loaned by Credit Suisse and VTB which were supposed to be used to protect the country’s special economic zone,” the court ruled.

Source – www.upi.com

A federal court in Argentina sentenced the current Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to six years in prison and a life ban from public office after finding her guilty of corruption.

The court found her guilty of fraudulent administration during her time as president from 2007 to 2015 in awarding public works contracts to friend and businessman Lázaro Báez, who was also given a six-year sentence as part of the same case. Last year, Báez was sentenced to 12 years in a separate case for money laundering.

The prosecutors said that they found irregularities in multiple public work tenders awarded in the southern province of Santa Cruz, where the vice president had been a deputy and senator. It is the first time a sitting vice president has been convicted of a crime.

The federal prosecutor, Diego Luciani, who had asked for 12 years, described it as “probably the biggest corruption operation the country has known.” Public works were found to be overpriced with many of the construction projects never completed. “There was a diversion of huge sums of money to Lázaro Báez,” Luciani said, adding that “it was sought to cover up the lack of capacity of the company.”

Although de Kirchner will avoid jail due to her immunity as a lawmaker and will launch an appeal, the historic case has highlighted the deep political division in the country.

Under the stifling morning sun, crowds of supporters of the vice president started to gather outside the Palace of Justice, enclosed by barricades and a reinforced federal police presence. The neoclassical building houses the Supreme Court as well as the lower courts, from where the verdict was read out just after 5:00 p.m.

De Kirchner, who is facing other corruption and money laundering charges, has continuously denied them and described them as politically motivated and part of the lawfare waged against her by economic powers and mainstream media.

The vice president spoke from her office in Congress immediately after the verdict was read. “They are a parallel state. It is the judicial mafia,” she said before adding that, “they want me in prison or dead.” On Sept. 1, de Kirchner survived an assassination attempt when a gunman approached her among a crowd of supporters and pulled the trigger but failed to fire.

President Alberto Fernández spoke in support of de Kirchner.

“Today in Argentina, an innocent person has been convicted. Today, I accompany and stand in solidarity with Cristina, knowing that she is the victim of an absolutely unfair persecution. All good men and women who love democracy and the rule of law must stand by her side,” Fernández said.

The vice president has strongly questioned the validity of the case, stating that the charges were brought up in a previous case in Santa Cruz and that she couldn’t be tried twice for the same fact. The Supreme Court rejected the argument in June, stating that the “double criminal prosecution is not compromised since, as the appellant herself maintains, she was not a party to the proceedings in the local court.”

Left and center-left leaders in the region also support the vice president, condemning the trial as orchestrated by the right-wing, the justice system and the media. The Puebla Group, made up of left-wing and progressive movements, stated that the trial was “motivated by the dark political interests of powerful economic conglomerates.”

Prosecutors also handed out sentences to seven other people involved in the case, ranging between six and three and a half years. Among them was José López, the former head of public works who became famous in 2016 after footage emerged of him trying to hide large bags of cash inside a nunnery.

Source – www.courthousenews.com

A Panamanian judge summoned former President Ricardo Martinelli to stand trial for a money laundering charge, investigators said on Friday.

Martinelli, who was in office from 2009 to 2014, is accused of laundering public funds through the purchase of a news outlet during his term. Nearly 20 others are charged in connection with the “New Business” case, as it is known.

In a statement earlier on Friday, Panama’s judiciary said arguments presented in a preliminary case in November showed that the funds used in the purchase were of illegal origin.

This is the second trial against Martinelli announced this year, and he is expected to testify in both in 2023.

Martinelli and his sons, Luis and Ricardo, are also charged in Panama for their alleged involvement in laundering millions of dollars in bribes from Brazilian construction company Odebrecht.

The two sons are currently serving prison sentences in the United States for their involvement in the scandal, which rocked South America.

Martinelli, who maintains his innocence, claims he is being politically targeted and has declared his intention to run as a candidate in the 2024 presidential elections.

Source – www.reuters.com

Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority said it had fined Santander (SAN.MC) 107.7 million pounds ($132 million) for “serious and persistent” gaps in the Spanish bank’s anti-money laundering controls for more than 560,000 business customers.

The FCA said on Friday that between Dec. 31 2012 and Oct. 18 2017, Santander’s UK arm failed to properly oversee and manage its anti-money laundering systems.

The fine is the latest action by Britain’s financial watchdog, as it tries to clamp down on poor internal controls by banks that allow illicit funds to flow through them.

Santander had ineffective systems to verify the information provided by customers about the business they would be doing, the FCA said.

“In one case, a new customer opened an account as a small translations business with expected monthly deposits of 5,000 pounds. Within six months, it was receiving millions in deposits, and swiftly transferring the money to separate accounts,” Mark Steward, FCA executive director for enforcement, said in a statement.

Source – www.reuters.com

Source – www.bbc.co.uk

The former nurse of late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has been found guilty of money laundering in connection to bribes paid by a billionaire media mogul to green light lucrative currency transactions when she served as the country’s national treasurer.

A jury in south Florida deliberated for just a few hours Tuesday before finding Claudia Diaz and her husband, Adrían Velasquez, guilty of five of the six counts detailed in a 2020 indictment accusing them of taking at least $4.2 million in bribes.

The couple’s jury trial was seen as a critical test of federal prosecutors’ ability to hold accountable so-called Venezuelan kleptocrats for fleecing the oil rich nation.

According to the indictment, the couple received payments from companies controlled by a Venezuelan co-defendant, fugitive media mogul Raul Gorrin, to accounts in Miami allegedly used to pay for the couple’s otherwise unexplained lavish lifestyle.

The government’s case relied heavily on the testimony of one of Diaz’s predecessors as Treasurer, Alejandro Andrade, who took the witness stand to testify that the financial arrangement he struck with Gorrin continued under Diaz.

Like Diaz, Andrade, a former presidential security officer, leveraged a personal connection with Chavez to rise through the ranks of the army and the Venezuelan state, amassing a huge fortune almost overnight.

In 2021, he was released from prison after serving less than half of a 10-year sentence for his role in a massive scheme to siphon millions from state coffers. As part of his plea agreement, he forfeited more than $260 million in cash and assets, including an oceanfront Palm Beach mansion, luxury vehicles, show-jumping horses and several Rolex and Hublot watches.

The trial took place as normally hostile relations between the U.S. and Venezuelan are starting to ease after the Trump-era policy of “maximum pressure” to remove President Nicolás Maduro has stalled.

Recently the Biden administration loosened crushing oil sanctions against the OPEC nation, allowing U.S. oil company Chevron for the first time in more than three years to resume production to support fledgling negotiations with the opposition.

Source – www.independent.co.uk

Danske Bank A/S, Denmark’s largest bank, has agreed to pay about $2 billion to settle long-running probes into anti-money-laundering failures that led to hundreds of billions of dollars of suspicious transactions flowing largely unchecked through a former branch in Estonia.

The Copenhagen-based bank on Tuesday said it had reached coordinated settlements with the U.S. Justice Department, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Denmark’s Special Crime Unit. The bank admitted to defrauding other banks regarding its Estonia customers and its anti-money-laundering controls.

Source – www.wsj.com