Article: UK banks ‘handled’ $740m in laundered Russian money

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UK banks ‘handled’ $740m in laundered Russian money

Arab News, 22 March 2017

LONDON: Several British banks allegedly processed nearly $740 million in a multi-billion dollar Russian money-laundering scam, The Guardian newspaper reported on Monday.

According to documents obtained by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, at least $20 billion was moved out of Russia between 2010 and 2014 in a vast criminal operation called “The Global Laundromat.” The scam involved over 500 people including oligarchs and Russian criminals with links to the government and the domestic intelligence agency, the FSB. Continue reading “Article: UK banks ‘handled’ $740m in laundered Russian money”

Article: Russian mafia boss still at large after FBI wiretap at Trump Tower

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Russian mafia boss still at large after FBI wiretap at Trump Tower

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Article: Bank of Israel under fire over decade-long currency intervention

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Bank of Israel under fire over decade-long currency intervention

Steven Scheer, 08 March 2017

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – The Bank of Israel has a problem. After spending almost a decade and huge sums trying to curb the shekel, the currency is still rising relentlessly – to the dismay of the country’s exporters.

In 2008 the central bank began what was supposed to be a temporary fix. The plan was to buy large amounts of dollars and halt a rapid rise in the shekel, partly to protect exporters who account for more than 30 percent of economic output and form a strong domestic lobby.

But after purchasing more than $70 billion over the years, the bank is still struggling to soften the exchange rate and prevent Israeli exports from becoming relatively more expensive on world markets. Continue reading “Article: Bank of Israel under fire over decade-long currency intervention”

Article: BlackRock, PIMCO said to plan new front in bank FX-rigging cases

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BlackRock, PIMCO said to plan new front in bank FX-rigging cases

Bloomberg, 05 March 2017

Some of the world’s biggest investors are working with a U.S. law firm to prepare a fresh wave of litigation against banks accused of rigging foreign-exchange markets.

BlackRock, Pacific Investment Management Co. and hedge fund BlueCrest Capital Management are working with law firm Quinn Emanuel to recover losses they blame on the manipulation of currency benchmarks, according to two people familiar with the case, who asked not to be identified because nothing has been filed.

The target banks, including Barclays, Citigroup, HSBC Holdings, J.P. Morgan Chase, Royal Bank of Scotland Group and UBS Group, have been fined billions of dollars for conspiring to rig FX benchmarks. The firm, which will probably file lawsuits in London and New York, is trying to attract additional investors, the people said.

Quinn Emanuel’s clients will likely opt out of an existing New York class action over currency manipulation that won a total of about $2 billion in settlements from HSBC, Barclays, RBS, Goldman Sachs Group and others in 2015, according to people with knowledge of the firm’s strategy.

Opting out of the class action would allow large investors to seek higher settlements by pursuing a global strategy that includes the recovery of losses from London, where a significant portion of global trades are settled. The existing class action is limited to transactions that took place in New York.

The two law firms that are running the existing U.S. lawsuit, Hausfeld and Scott + Scott, won’t give up control of the case without a fight.

In an April 24 letter emailed to U.S. District Judge Lorna Schofield, lawyers complained that “certain unnamed law firms were sending false and misleading communications to class members to persuade them to opt out of the settlements,” the judge said in a court order Thursday. She set a May 12 deadline for the two firms to make a formal request as to what she should do in response.

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Article: Consolidate Audit Trail – Timeliness of Reporting

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Consolidate Audit Trail – Timeliness of Reporting

Finance Magnates, 2 March 2017

While US broker dealers anticipate the initiation of the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT), many aspects of this regulation remains a topic of conversation for the industry.

One area of particular interest is the subject of timeliness for reporting. ‘Timeliness’ has been defined as “when the data is available to regulators and how long it would take to process before it could be used for regulatory analysis.” So how does one determine whether the current CAT NMS Plans will allow for timeliness of reporting, and what opportunities are there for technology to help support this objective?

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THE DOLLAR HAS NO INTRINSIC VALUE : DO YOUR ASSETS?