Gang used WhatApp group called ‘Sunshine and lollipops’ to co-ordinate money laundering between the UK and Dubai. Six members of a money laundering network which smuggled more than £100million from the UK to the UAE using suitcases have been jailed. The network transported the cash to Dubai during 83 separate trips between November 2019 and October 2020, overseen by ringleader...
Each year, money launders funnel $2 trillion in ill-gotten gains into the financial system. And a lot of that money travels by air, in cash, often in people’s suitcases, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Sunday (April 21). The report cited figures from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) showing that international...
Eswatini’s king professed to have a bold plan for a thriving economic zone. ICIJ uncovered two phantom gold refineries channeling millions of dollars to Dubai through it. Against a backdrop of rolling hills and sugar cane fields, a generous stretch of cleared land borders the small industrial town of Matsapha in central Eswatini, a tiny...
The ringleader of a money laundering group that smuggled tens of millions of pounds of criminal cash out of the UK has been hit with a confiscation order. Abdullah Alfalasi was given the order totalling £3,496,778.68 following a National Crime Agency investigation into his finances. The 48-year-old Emirati national was previously convicted of co-ordinating a...
A humanitarian and human rights catastrophe is unfolding in Sudan. With nearly 11 million people already displaced—three million of them children—the country is now home to the most people rendered homeless by conflict worldwide, and its populace sits poised on the brink of a major famine. A collapsing medical system renders the war’s true death...
On Friday 23 February, the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has removed the United Arab Emirates from its “gray list”. The move, critics say, has more to do with political considerations than with any real improvement in fighting money laundering on the part of the UAE authorities. The United Arab Emirates were first added...
As the U.S. opioid crisis spirals further out of control, and threatens to engulf Europe, the U.S. government has been scrambling in recent weeks for solutions. Some are sensible, if misguided, such as the Biden administration’s “fentanyl strike force” within the Treasury Department to aggressively scrutinize the finances of suspected narcotics dealers. Others, such as...
Bertrand Monnet is a professor, but his field work and research is a little… unusual. Bertrand Monnet is a professor of economic crime at EDHEC Business School in Lille, France. But he’s not like the professors you had at university, quietly sinking five pints of ale in the local each night before plodding off home to watch Blackadder repeats....
Two men from London have become the fifteenth and sixteenth members of a £100m+ money laundering network to be convicted, following a major National Crime Agency investigation into cash smuggling from the UK to the UAE. Guilty verdicts were returned yesterday (11 January) on Ali Al-Nawab, 40, from Golders Green, London, and Mehdi Amrollahbibiyouki, 41,...
By ALISHA HOULIHAN for AML Intelligence GREYLISTED UAE has made a “substantial donation” to the funding of the body representing the world’s police Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs). The Egmont Group of FIUs represents most of the main FIUs and held its most recent annual conference at a glittering venue in Abu Dhabi. Today (Wed) the...