A three-years-long investigation into money laundering within Canada’s British Columbia revealed that provincial and federal authorities are ill-equipped to prevent the proceeds of crime from infiltrating the province’s economy.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) uncovered on Monday a multi-year penny stock scheme that generated US$194 million in illicit proceeds, leading to charges against 15 individuals and one corporate consulting firm spanning three continents.

INTERPOL said that it has launched a Financial Crime and Anti-Corruption Center (IFCACC) in order to fight the exponential growth in sophisticated transnational financial crime.

Czech authorities announced last week possible charges against Prime Minister Andrej Babiš for fraud involving EU tax subsidies, but they later reportedly passed the case to the new European Public Prosecutor's Office, launched last week to handle financial crimes against the EU.

Pope Francis introduced on Thursday a new anti-corruption law that requires all Vatican cardinals and workers in managing positions to disclose whether they have been convicted of financial crimes in the past.

The U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) asked last week for the public to comment on a series of questions about the new beneficial ownership reporting requirements of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA), according to an Advance Notice of Public Rulemaking (ANPR).

The European Union’s agency for law enforcement cooperation between member states has determined a ‘working relationship’ with a new, independent body set up to investigate and prosecute sophisticated cross-border financial crime.

The EU plans to close the legislative and technical loopholes that allow money laundering to remain rampant in many EU states, Raluca Pruna, the head of the European Commission’s Financial Crime Unit, said in an interview with AML intelligence last week.

A Federal Court in Boston sent on Wednesday a Canadian citizen behind bars for artificially inflating stocks owned by him and his co-conspirators with the intention to generate US$15 million in fraudulent proceeds.

The US financial regulatory agencysuspended an accountant on Wednesday following a year-long prison sentence he received for having illicitly acquired confidential information about when and how KPMG, the accounting firm he worked for, would be inspected in order improve results. 

KPMG Headquarters Photo Credit: Line Ørstavik (CC BY 2.0)The US Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC, barred David Middendorf from practicing accounting in the three states he previously was certified in -- Georgia, New York, and Ohio. 

 Middendorf served as a former national managing partner for audit quality at the “Big Four” accounting firm, KPMG, at the time the firm fared poorly in inspections conducted by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, PCAOB, a nonprofit corporation overseen by the SEC that inspects the audit work performed by registered accounting firms.

 Under the leadership of Middendorf, several employees worked to improve the firm’s performance by recruiting and hiring former PCAOB employees and obtaining information on which KPMG audits would be inspected, according to the Department of Justice. 

Jeffery Wada, an inspection leader at the PCAOB provided Cynthia Holder, a former PCAOB employee who was hired by KPMG, with confidential information about future audits on the company’s findings. 

 “I have the grocery list… All the things you’ll need for the year,” Wada texted Holder, in reference to the entire 2017 final confidential  inspection selections. Holder shared this information to Brian Sweet, another former PCAOB employee who had joined KPMG, who then passed the information on to Middendorf. 

 Authorities arrested the group in 2018 and charged them with conspiracy and wire fraud.

 A US$50 million fine was also issued to KPMG by the SEC last summer for altering past audit work. The firm was also ordered to hire an independent consultant “to review and assess the firm’s ethics and integrity controls and its compliance with various undertakings,” a press release by the agency stated. 

“The breadth and seriousness of the misconduct at issue here is, frankly, astonishing,” Steven Peikin, Co-Director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division, said in the same press release. “This settlement reflects the need to severely punish this sort of wrongdoing while putting in place measures designed to prevent its recurrence.”

Polish authorities arrested a former defence ministry official, a former parliamentarian and four more suspects as part of an investigation into the mismanagement of assets at the country’s state-owned defence firm, according to a statement released on Monday.

Aerospace giant Airbus has begun an internal investigation into possible corruption following a series of dubious financial transactions uncovered by the Guardian that resulted in a multi-million dollar unexplained payment, theGuardian reported Monday.

Pakistan’s largest bank will shutter its only branch in the United States after regulators there announced they were seeking a US$ 630 million fine for failure to follow anti-money laundering measures, Reuters reported Monday.

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) disclosed Friday that it is under investigation by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority for suspicions of money laundering "in relation to certain customers."

The US has accused a Chinese-based company of laundering money from a sanctioned North Korean bank through American financial institutions, Reuters reported Friday.

An Argentinian judge on Thursdayordered the former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner to stand trial on charges that she organized a plan to defraud the government over US$ 3 billion by manipulating the country’s Central Bank.

Vietnamese anti-corruption police arrested seven former members of TrustBank’s Credit Board for allegedly approving illegal loans causing approximately US$ 21 million in losses, state media reported Wednesday.

The US Department of Justice (USDOJ) and New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) have expanded their Deutsche Bank money-laundering probe to determine whether western sanctions against Russia were breached.

A company director has been sentenced to four years in prison for fraudulently obtaining a loan of € 1.7 million (US$ 1.9 million) from the Banca de Economii (BEM) – one of the financial institutions at the heart of Moldova's "missing billion" scandal.

The US Department of State has announced US$ 3 million in rewards for tips that would help them arrest two alleged leaders of an online cybercrime syndicate responsible for US$ 50 million of financial losses worldwide.