In 1996, in How not to be a money launderer, I wrote the following:
"Bank Leu is a legitimate Swiss bank with an office in Luxembourg. In 1993, it was convicted in a district court in California of laundering drugs money originating in Columbia. Bank Leu had no branches nor even representative offices in the USA, in fact it had no presence there at all."
In 2003, another author, with the backing of a large publisher, wrote
"Bank Leu is a legitimate bank in Europe: it has no representation in the United States of any kind, or at least did not in 1993. ... that in that year it was convicted...
A recent spate of cases in the USA has, after the best part of a decade, concluded that crypto-assets are to be regarded as property.
Seriously: this is one of the simplest things to work out and courts - and legislatures - have been making a meal out of something that is blindingly obvious.
Yet, bizarrely, it's not only US courts that are finding this difficult.
As lockdowns continue - and are eased - there is an obvious but forgotten crisis that has already begun but is going to get far, far, worse. And this time it's a human not an economic or medical crisis.
We've added around 1,000 subscribers since the last newsletter so, to you,
thank you and to those who've been on the list for, in some cases, getting
on for 20 years, thanks for your patience over the past few months while
other things have taken priority.
In one of the worst kept secrets of recent times, the case of Rihan v EY Global and others has reached its first major milestone - a formal hearing before the English High Court. It's all about money laundering, skulduggery and all that sexy stuff. But that's just froth. The real meat of the Order comes in the far less seductive part of the case - the choice of venue and corporate responsibility for downstream malfeasance.
As I am putting to bed what might be the most ambitious project we will tackle for a while at financialcrimeriskandcompliancetraining.com , a course designed for teenagers and young people up to 24 years of age on avoiding being a victim of financial crime, one big issue has been added at the last minute - the range of conduct that criminals are adopting as their response to the coronavirus / CoVid-19 epidemic / pandemic. Across the world, there are more and more examples of conduct, both in both the physical and cyber worlds.
While doing that, I've been doing the final checks on the rest...
There's something odd happening around the coffee tables of the world. It appears to be a social change that was not widely foreseen or, if it was, was kept secret.