Financial Crime Online

German car producer Daimler and its Russia and China subsidiaries reached an agreement with the US Justice department to settle Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) Charges.  The settlement follows allegations of widespread corruption within the company, or rather a corporate culture that encourages staff to bribe officials to secure contracts. Daimler acknowledged that is conspired [...]

Wells Fargo & Co’s Wachovia Bank agreed to cough up $160 million to end a criminal money laundering probe into the use of its exhange houses in Mexico by drug cartels. The government agreed to defer prosecution on a criminal charge that Wachovia did not set up an effective anti-money laundering program from 2003 to 2008. [...]

Ikea has always had the reputation to combat corruption to the max. It launched its first store in Russia in 2000. That launch was hindered by bureaucracy  and ‘bribe seeking’ attention from local officials. 7 years later, Ikea still faces the same hurdles each time it opens a store location: The store’s opening has reportedly [...]

How can you use stolen bank data? Or rather: who can use stolen  bank data? Last month a member of staff with HSBC allegedly took client files from his employer and ‘provided’ them to French authorities. The French were keen for the data for tax purposes; amongst HSBC clients in Switzerland there are a lot [...]

In crime reporting the attention is usually drawn to the ‘latest and greatest’. Spectacular stuff. Medicare fraud seems boring; not the place a cop would want to spend his career? Let’s view it from a criminal’s point of view; risk and reward. Medicare fraud nets billions, without the risks of getting shot or ripped. Medicare [...]

There we go: “Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations’ drugs and crime tsar, Mr. Costa, has told the Observer.” Leave it to UNODC to help bloggers and the press to come up with interesting headlines. The head of the UN [...]

Swiss authorities apparently opened a criminal investigation after being informed that a former HSBC employee took client data from HSBC Switzerland and provided these client details to French authorities. According to the French newspaper Le Parisien the files contain thousands of client records from the HSBC Private Banking Geneva. The bank did confirm that a [...]

‘Fort Lauderdale Attorney Charged in Billion-Dollar Ponzi Scheme’. This headline would probably have hit you harder in a pre-Madoff era. But even now this is quite an impressive allegation. The FBI and IRS seek to confiscate $1.2 billion, including (the usual) ferraris, roll’s royces, yachts, houses, jewelry, bank accounts in Morocco and Gibraltar and what [...]

Finally; a new acronym. FFETF. Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force. Why the wait? Anyway: a new task force, headed by DOJ, with a serious mission: “This task force’s mission is not just to hold accountable those who helped bring about the last financial meltdown, but to prevent another meltdown from happening.” The taskforce  is composed [...]

According to Bloomberg, Hong Kong is the new target of U.S. prosecutors pursuing a global campaign against evaders of federal taxes, spurred by data acquired in their crackdown on Swiss banks. The push follows the government’s success in penetrating Swiss bank secrecy and learning from insiders how UBS AG helped Americans evade taxes. UBS, the [...]