This week saw the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) expose thousands of confidential documents, known as the FinCEN Files. Here, we provide some initial observations on what the leaked documents say about the current state of the global financial crime compliance landscape.

Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) are confidential records of unusual financial activity detected by financial institutions as part of their financial crime compliance obligations. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) received more than 12 million SARs between 2011 and 2017 – and more than two million in 2019 alone.

The real estate industry is frequently used as a conduit for money laundering activities. Every year, around $1.6 trillion of dirty money moves through this market – equivalent to 3% of the world’s GDP. In this article, we explore an important element within this topic – escrow (or trust) accounts.

The EU's Fifth Anti-money Laundering Directive has extended the list of sectors that fall within the scope of the updated regulations. These new ‘obliged entities’ are required to implement financial crime prevention processes, including adverse media screening, in line with the practices carried out by banks and other regulated sectors.

In the second part of our Q&A with Hdeel Abdelhady, Principal Attorney at MassPoint Legal and Strategy Advisory PLLC, we ask her about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on international sanctions and supply chains.

As part of our ‘Ask the Expert’ series, we ask Hdeel Abdelhady, Principal Attorney at MassPoint Legal and Strategy Advisory PLLC, about international sanctions, enforcement trends, and the role of lawyers as gatekeepers of the financial system.

This article was originally published by PaymentsSource. In the global fight against financial crime, each world region faces unique challenges, and those faced by the Middle East are, arguably, some of the most complex. Geographical proximity to less stable countries inevitably makes members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) vulnerable to money laundering and terrorist […]

We are taking a look back at our top five most visited blogs for the first half of 2019.

Recent news that a Maersk company carried arms components from North Korea to Egypt, in a violation of international sanctions, acts as a fresh warning for those facilitating global trade to be diligent in monitoring and reporting suspicious activity. The transportation of electrical components by a Maersk subsidiary, which had the potential to be used […]