Author: 5amResearch

The American bank Wells Fargo has been fined $97.8m (£79m) by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department for breaching US sanctions laws. Inadequate oversight meant that it allowed a foreign institution to process $532m in illegal transactions involving Iran, Syria and Sudan. Wells Fargo said it stopped dealing with the client in 2015.

The U.S. Virgin Islands issued subpoenas this week to Sergey Brin, Thomas Pritzker, Mortimer Zuckerman and Michael Ovitz to gather information for its civil lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase & Co. over the bank’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, according to people familiar with the matter.

The subpoenas from the U.S. territory’s attorney general seek any communications and documents related to the bank and Epstein, the people said.

The four men are some of the wealthiest people in the U.S., and it couldn’t be determined why they were being asked for the communications and documents. In civil cases, lawyers can use subpoenas during the discovery process to get information from people who aren’t a party to a lawsuit but could provide evidence related to the case.

The U.S. Virgin Islands sued JPMorgan late last year in a Manhattan federal court, saying the bank facilitated Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking and abuse by allowing the late financier to remain a client and helping him send money to his victims. The civil lawsuit alleges that JPMorgan received referrals of high-value business opportunities from Epstein and turned a blind eye to his activities. The bank has said it didn’t know about Epstein’s alleged crimes and can’t be held liable.

Lawyers for a wealthy self-exiled Chinese businessman who developed ties to Trump administration figures including Steve Bannon are seeking bail for him two weeks after his arrest, saying other defendants accused of massive frauds like Bernard Madoff and Sam Bankman-Fried were freed on bail.

The lawyers submitted papers in Manhattan federal court, saying Guo Wengui is entitled to bail just as other wealthy defendants have been given the chance to post bail in the past. They also challenged claims by prosecutors that he is a risk to flee, saying he would not leave his wife of 38 years and his daughter as all three seek asylum.

Madoff was free for several months in late 2008 and early 2009 before he was jailed after he pleaded guilty in a multibillion-dollar fraud. He was later sentenced to 150 years in prison and died behind bars.

Bankman-Fried, 31, was arrested in the Bahamas in December in what a prosecutor called one of biggest frauds in American history. He agreed to return to the United States, where he was freed with GPS monitoring on a $250 million personal recognizance bond after pleading not guilty to charges that he oversaw a massive cryptocurrency fraud.

The United Arab Emirates’ central bank on Friday said it will cancel the licence it granted last year to Russia’s MTS bank, which was placed under British and US sanctions in February.

Operations at the bank’s UAE branch, which is licensed in the emirate of Abu Dhabi, will be wound down within six months under UAE central bank supervision.

A statement from MTS Bank said it will fulfil all settlement obligations to existing customers and guarantee the safety of their funds for six months.

“This decision comes after considering the available options regarding the new status of the MTS Bank and taking into account the sanctions risks associated with the bank,” the UAE central bank’s statement said.

The International Monetary Fund said on Friday its executive board approved a four-year $15.6 billion loan program for Ukraine, part of a global $115 billion package to support the country’s economy as it battles Russia’s 13-month-old invasion.

The decision clears the way for an immediate disbursement of about $2.7 billion to Kyiv, and requires Ukraine to carry out ambitious reforms, especially in the energy sector, the Fund said in a statement.

The Extended Fund Facility (EFF) loan is the first major conventional financing program approved by the IMF for a country involved in a large-scale war.

A jury will decide whether Fox Corp defamed Dominion Voting Systems with false vote-rigging claims aired by Fox News after the 2020 US election, a judge has ruled.

In a setback to the media company that had sought to avoid a trial in the $US1.6 billion ($A2.4 billion) lawsuit, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis on Friday denied motions from Fox and partially granted Dominion motions to resolve the issue of defamation liability ahead of the scheduled April 17 trial date.

Former Attorney General of Louisiana, Charles C. Foti, Jr., Esq., a partner at the law firm of Kahn Swick & Foti, LLC (“KSF”), announces that KSF has commenced an investigation into Redwire Corporation (NYSE: RDW).

In November 2021, the Company disclosed that it could not timely file its quarterly report due to an internal investigation into accounting issues. On March 31, 2022, the Company disclosed a multitude of internal procedural and control failures, including “an additional material weakness” beyond the company’s “previously identified internal control deficiencies.” The next day, the Company finally filed its 3Q2021 report revealing that its “disclosure controls and procedures” suffered from an inadequate “control environment” and that “certain members of senior management failed to consistently message and set certain aspects of an appropriate tone at the top.”

The Committee has learned that while Mr. Taibbi was describing his findings of government abuse and civil liberties violations, an IRS revenue officer appeared at Mr. Taibbi’s personal residence in New Jersey — leaving a note for Mr. Taibbi to call the IRS four days later. When Mr. Taibbi called the IRS, the IRS informed him that the reason for the visit was because his electronic 2018 and 2021 tax return filings had been rejected due to concerns of identity theft.

According to Mr. Taibbi, the IRS notified his accountant that the IRS had accepted his 2018 filing, and in the four-and-a-half years since then, the IRS has never notified Mr. Taibbi or his accountant of any issue with this return — until the day he was testifying before Congress. With respect to his 2021 return, the IRS rejected Mr. Taibbi’s electronic filing twice, even after his accountant filed with an IRS-provided pin number. In both cases, the IRS informed Mr. Taibbi after the agency visited his home that the problems were not “monetary”; in fact, the IRS apparently owed Mr. Taibbi a “considerable” tax return.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said the verdict could not stand after the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board canceled the virtual private network (VPN) patents VirnetX accused Apple of infringing.

The ruling follows the Federal Circuit’s Thursday decision to affirm a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office tribunal’s finding that the patents were invalid.

Russia has opened a criminal case against Pussy Riot founding member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova for allegedly “insulting religious sensibilities,” human rights lawyer Pavel Chikov said on his Telegram channel on Wednesday.

The Investigative Committee opened the case due to various of Tolokonnikova’s posts on social media, Chikov said, adding that a series of police searches had been carried out as part of the investigation, though he gave no further details.

Which of Tolokonnikova’s social media posts prompted the charges is also yet to be established.

“Dear Investigative Committee of Russia. Stop f***ing around threatening political activists with more criminal cases. Go after actual criminals, such as the war criminal Vladimir Putin. Best of luck,” Tolokonnikova said in a statement on Pussy Riot’s Instagram.

A potential Russian “petition” on a preventive nuclear strike could come in response to any initiative to transfer US nuclear weapons to Ukraine, Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev said on his Telegram channel.

A petition calling for the deployment of US nuclear weapons on Ukrainian soil was posted on Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s website on Thursday.

Medvedev blogged that the response could, in all probability, take the form of “a Russian petition in favor of the immediate pre-emptive use of Russian nuclear weapons.”

For decades, the major banks – along with AMP – dominated the financial planning landscape, employing or authorising the vast majority of licensed advisers. The remaining 16,000 providers – most of them independent or privately owned – are insufficient in number to meet the advice needs of the millions of Baby Boomers set to retire in coming years.

And the mountains of red tape the remaining advisers must comply with – thanks largely, it must be said, to the misdeeds of the bank-owned advice providers – have made their services too expensive for most families to afford even if they wanted to.

After a relatively calm week in banking, Deutsche Bank is now making headlines for a falling share price and rising CDS spreads.

In an apparent attempt to show strength, the company announced that it would redeem a bond issue early, but the market had other ideas.

Shares of major U.S. banks such as JPMorgan Chase & Co, Wells Fargo and Bank of America dropped between 1% and 2% in early trade.

Shares of regional lenders First Republic Bank, PacWest Bancorp, Western Alliance Bancorp and Truist Financial Corp fell between 1% to 5%.

The S&P 500 banking index and the KBW regional banking index, hit their lowest since late 2020 in the previous session, fell 1.6% and 1.2%, respectively.

European banks also came under pressure after a report on a U.S. probe into Credit Suisse and UBS further soured the mood. Their U.S.-listed shares were down about 5.4% and 4.1%, respectively.

U.S. shares of Deutsche Bank fell nearly 10% after the bank’s credit default swaps rose to a four-year high.

U.S. two-year Treasury yields fell sharply to their lowest levels since September on Friday.

U.S. corporate due diligence firm Mintz Group said on Thursday its Beijing office was raided by authorities and five Chinese staff were detained, stoking worry among foreign companies in China just as its capital hosts an international economic forum.

News of the raid and detentions comes as Sino-U.S. relations have spiraled downwards following months of diplomatic tensions, including over the U.S. military downing in February of a suspected Chinese spy balloon and a planned U.S. transit next week by the president of Taiwan, the self-governed island China claims as its territory.

“We can confirm that Chinese authorities have detained the five staff in Mintz Group’s Beijing office, all of them Chinese nationals, and have closed our operations there,” the company said in an emailed statement to Reuters.

The company said it was ready to work with Chinese authorities to “resolve any misunderstanding that may have led to these events”, and that its top concern was the safety and wellbeing of colleagues in China.

Credit Suisse Group AG and UBS Group AG are among the banks under scrutiny in a US Justice Department probe into whether financial professionals helped Russian oligarchs evade sanctions, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Swiss banks were included in a recent wave of subpoenas sent out by the US government, the people said. The information requests were sent before the crisis that engulfed Credit Suisse and resulted in UBS’s proposed takeover of its rival.

Subpoenas also went to employees of some major US banks, two people with knowledge of the inquiries, said.

The Justice Department inquiries are focused on identifying which bank employees dealt with sanctioned clients and how those clients were vetted over the past several years.