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Hello! It’s June 1, and we’re tracking today’s top stories: How AI could stamp out or accelerate financial crime, millions laundered through Latvia’s ABLV, three ‘Stop Cop City’ activists arrested for financial crimes, interview with U.S. Treasury author of 2023 de-risking strategy, and much more.

Featured Story

🎯How AI could help stamp out financial crime — or help accelerate it. Several banks have already adopted versions of AI — including HSBC and ING — in their quest to improve their compliance with AML rules after their well-publicized failures to do so. [more]

Top Stories

🔸The Cleaner and the Laundromat: Belarusian Cleaning Magnate Laundered Millions Through Disgraced Latvian Bank ABLV. Investigators suspect the owner of “Clean World,” a well-known cleaning business that stretches across Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. [more]

🔸Three "Stop Cop City" activists arrested for financial crimes. A law enforcement task force investigating the activists trying to block the construction of Atlanta's proposed public safety training center have charged three people with financial crimes. [more]

🔸Interview with U.S. Treasury’s Jonathan Fishman on Government’s 2023 De-risking Strategy. [more]

🔸China, India receive record Russian crude oil in May. Russian crude oil imports by China and India in May are expected to hit an all-time high as buyers gorged on discounted supplies. [more]

🔸Nvidia’s CEO Plans Trip to Meet China Executives Despite U.S. Curbs. U.S. sanctions prevent the semiconductor company from selling its most advanced AI chipsets to Chinese customers, including Tencent and ByteDance. [more]

🔸Trump captured on tape talking about classified document he kept after leaving the White House. Federal prosecutors have obtained an audio recording of a summer 2021 meeting in which he acknowledges he held onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran. [more]

🔸Senator Elizabeth Warren Calls for Shutdown of Crypto Funding for Fentanyl. Warren cited the rampant use of cryptocurrency in the Chinese fentanyl trade during a Wednesday hearing. [more]

🔸EU Formally Signs New Crypto Licensing, Money Laundering Rules Into Law. Landmark Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) takes the bloc closer to becoming the first major jurisdiction in the world with tailored rules for the sector. [more]

🔸Brazil's top court sentences ex-President Collor to prison for corruption. Collor was a dashing, liberalizing politician who became Brazil's first democratically elected president in 1989 after a two-decade military dictatorship. [more]

🔸Vatican questions how priest moved $17 million meant for missionary work into investment fund. The story of what happened to the money is one that has vexed Vatican officials on both sides of the Atlantic, all the more because the transfers appear entirely legal. [more]

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IN THE NEWS

Russia & China

🔸Rosneft Q1 Profit Soars As Russian Oil Output Cuts Remain Invisible. Russian state-run oil giant Rosneft saw its first-quarter 2023 net profit rise by over 45% to around $4 billion. [more]

🔸China says it will monitor EU talks on Russia sanctions, defend Chinese firms. The EU’s executive European Commission for the first time has proposed a tool to limit trade with third countries deemed to be bypassing sanctions. [more]

🔸Suspected Chinese spies, disguised as tourists, tried to infiltrate Alaskan military bases. In one incident, search of a vehicle with Chinese citizens found a drone inside. [more]

🔸Russia fines WhatsApp for first time for not deleting banned content. Other Meta services, Facebook and Instagram – now banned in Russia – have been fined over content, as have the likes of Twitter and Alphabet's Google. [more]

Corruption & Financial Crime

🔸How a Mexican state siphoned off millions – and a reporter risked her life to expose it. María Teresa Montaño Delgado was kidnapped while investigating suspicious contracts worth $300M awarded by the state of Mexico. [more]

🔸Crown Resorts and AUSTRAC agree to $450 million fine over money laundering breaches. Crown has admitted that it failed to assess the money laundering and terrorism financing risks facing its casinos, and did not have appropriate risk-based systems in place to mitigate the risks. [more]

🔸Contaminated Drugs, Shredded Papers: US FDA Uncovers Failures in India Pharma Factories. US inspectors uncovered wide-ranging lapses at factories run by some of India’s biggest pharmaceutical firms. [more]

🔸HM Treasury’s sanctions police ‘reviewing’ finances of Everton FC owner. Farhad Moshiri reportedly a ‘person of interest’ at special unit over links to sanctioned oligarch Alisher Usman. [more]

Crypto & Cyber

🔸Cyberweapon manufacturers plot to stay on the right side of US. By the time Biden entered office, NSO’s lucrative customers were proving to be its Achilles heel, as many of those regimes continued to deploy the multimillion-dollar weapon against journalists, dissidents, and opposition leaders. [more]

🔸Former Operator of Payza.com Charged with Laundering 450 Bitcoin. Defendant Laundered $24 million in Bitcoin from the Payza Conspiracy While Waiting to Report to Prison in an Earlier Prosecution. [more]

🔸EU’s Banking Regulator Highlights AML Risks in Privacy Coins, Self-Hosted Wallets. The European Banking Authority wants to extend money laundering guidance to crypto firms and banks that trade with them. [more]

🔸Discord Admins Hacked by Malicious Bookmarks. A number of Discord communities focused on cryptocurrency have been hacked this past month after their administrators were tricked into running malicious Javascript code disguised as a Web browser bookmark. [more]

Reports & Testimony

📗FATF: Qatar's measures to combat money laundering and terrorist financing. [more]

📗Countering China: Advancing U.S. National Security, Economic Security, and Foreign Policy. [more]

📗Upcoming: Dollar Dominance: Preserving the U.S. Dollar’s Status as the Global Reserve Currency” [more]

📗BIS concludes Project Aurora, a proof of concept based on the use of data, technology and collaboration to combat money laundering across institutions and borders. [more]

"Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right." --Henry Ford

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