In December 2018, the Inter-American Development issued a report of an expert advisory group on a comprehensive approach to combating anti-corruption and bringing enhanced transparency and integrity to Latin America and the Caribbean.

On December 18, 2018, court documents were unsealed charging Osondu Victor Igwilo, 49 of Lagos, Nigeria in a criminal complaint as the alleged ringleader of an international advance-fee scheme that involved false promises of investment funding by individuals who impersonated U.S. bank officials in in person and over the internet to victims around the world.  The victims were told they had had to make certain payments prior to supposedly receiving their funds.  The defendants allegedly laundered the proceeds of the scheme through U.S. bank accounts and diverted the funds to the scheme’s perpetrators in Nigeria.

Global flows of illicit financing are a universal affliction and continue to vex authorities and law enforcement agencies across the world as insidious threats present persistent risks to the world’s financial system. These threats do not distinguish by geography, and it is imperative that all countries are committed to implementing the strongest possible defenses against illicit financial flows. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region is no exception to this rule, and countries across the Region exhibit the hallmarks of systems that are increasingly determined to protect themselves against the harmful effects of nefarious activity. In this light, efforts that happen at the supra-national level are just as likely to prove instrumental to preventing money laundering and terrorist financing activity as the defenses that are applied at a national level.

On November 15-16, 2018, an international expert group meeting on and preventing abuse of legal professional privilege (LPP) explored the problems and potential remedies to responding to gaps in achieving transparency in beneficial ownership.  Approximately 30 stakeholders, primarily in law enforcement officials and Financial Action Task Force (FATF) officials, attended the meeting.

When Otto Warmbier left with a tour group on his five-day trip to North Korea, he was a healthy college junior at the University of Virginia. 17 months later, he returned to his parents Frederick and Cynthia Warmbier blind, deaf, and brain dead. In the intervening months, Warmbier had spent over a year in detention at a North Korean prison for allegedly stealing a sign supporting North Korean leader Kim Jung Il. At a televised press conference in North Korea on February 29, 2016, Warmbier, under visible distress, confessed to “severe crimes against” the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and claimed that he had been acting under the direction of the CIA. While imprisoned, he had no direct contact with his parents. A week after Warmbier returned home, he died from complications from severe brain damage.

On December 17, 2018, the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia announced the unsealing of an indictment, charging two men associated with former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn with conspiracy, acting in the United States as unregistered agents of the government of Turkey, and making false statements to the FBI in connection with efforts by the Turkiish government to extradite Fethullah Gulen from the U.S.

On December 20, 2018,  Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and other high-level U.S. officials announced the unsealing of an indictment charging Zhu Hua (朱华), aka Afwar, aka CVNX, aka Alayos, aka Godkiller; and Zhang Shilong (张士龙), aka Baobeilong, aka Zhang Jianguo, aka Atreexp, both nationals of the People’s Republic of China (China), with conspiracy to commit computer intrusions, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft.

On December 17, 2018, the Malaysian Attorney General filed criminal charges against Goldman Sachs with respect to the latter’s arrangement and underwriting for 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) in 2012 and 2013.  The prosecutor has charged Goldman Sachs and four individuals, two of them former Goldman employees, of “grave violations” of Malaysia’s securities laws.

Germany’s top appeals court has partially overturned the convictions of two Rwandan men, Ignace Murwanashyaka and his deputy Straton Musoni, who were accused of aiding and abetting war crimes in Rwanda. Their original trial, which was concluded in 2015, was a massive war crimes trial in which the Higher Regional Court in Stuttgart was in session for 320 days over a period of more than four years. The indictment, making use of the German Code of Crimes Against International Law (Völkerstrafgesetzbuch, CCAIL), which was introduced in 2002 to bring German criminal law in line with the provisions in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), was the first major test of the principle of universal jurisdiction. While the case resulted in convictions, it also highlighted the limits of universal jurisdiction in practice. The extremely limited sentencing of these two men initially, and the subsequent overturning of major segments of their convictions, reveal the degree to which a lack of domestic resources and overwhelming international friction to a loosely defined universal jurisdiction have made current efforts, such as those in Germany, largely ineffective.