At its 1312^th meeting held on April 4, 2018, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted its Recommendation CM/Rec(2018)6 on terrorists acting alone.

On May 3, 2018, U.S. District Judge Jon Levy in Portland, Maine sentenced William Sheldon to six months in prison followed by three years supervised release for trafficking juvenile American eels, also called “elvers” or “glass eels,” in violation of the Lacey Act.

On May 7, 2018, Nisar Ahmed Chaudhry, 71, of Columbia, Maryland, pleaded guilty to failure to file a Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) statement.

On April 7, 2018, police reports and relatives say a U.S. embassy vehicle driven by Defense and Air Attaché Col. Joseph Emanuel Hall collided with a motorcycle, killing 22-year-old motorcyclist Ateeq Baig, and injuring another person on the bike.  A Pakistani court has criticized Pakistani authorities for not imposing foreign travel restrictions on Hall.

In a 5-4 ruling issued on Tuesday, April 24, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) cannot be used to sue foreign corporations. With Justice Kennedy writing for the majority, the Court affirmed the Second Circuit’s decision to dismiss a lawsuit against Arab Bank PLC, a Jordanian financial institution with a branch in New York. The litigants claimed that the bank had facilitated transactions that had benefited terrorists that had committed attacks in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Kennedy was joined in his opinion by the Court’s conservative flank. The case is Jesner v. Arab Bank.

On April 19, 2018, Transparency International issued a report titled, G20 Leaders or Laggards? Review G20 promises on ending anonymous companies.

The TI report discusses how the major cross-border “grand corruption” scandals have tarnished the Group of 20 (G20) countries in recent years.  It cites the fact that in 2017 Odebrecht the Brazilian engineering company was assessed a US$2.6 billion fine for bribery after being charged with paying US$788 million in bribes. In the “Russian Laundromat” scandal, exposed in 2017, a group of individuals in G20 member Russia allegedly established 21 shell companies, which then moved and laundered illegal proceeds out of the country, making more than 26,000 payments to 96 different countries including every G20 country aside from Brazil.  Increasingly, anonymous companies hide the identity of the person at the source of the funds either to launder and transfer stolen money, or to operationalize corrupt deals, using companies and offshore accounts to pay bribes or buy influence.

On April 27, 2018, a superseding indictment was announced against four Chinese nationals:  Na Chu, 37; Yeyou Chu, 36; Cuiying Liu, 62; and Keping Zhang, 62.  The charges were announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, U.S. Attorney Christopher C. Myers for the District of North Dakota and Acting Assistant Attorney General John P. Cronan of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.

At its 17^th sitting held on April 26, 2018, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopted Resolution 2218 (2018) on fighting organized crime by facilitating the confiscation of illegal assets. The debate and resolution were based on a Report prepared by the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights.

On April 19, 2018, the EU Commissioners welcomed the adoption by the European Parliament of the 5^th Anti-Money Laundering Directive. On April 17, 2108, the European Commission adopted a directive on the rules to facilitate the use of financial and other information for the prevention, detection, investigation or prosecution of certain criminal offenses.