Category: Corruption

A senior South Korean security official said on Tuesday that information contained in purportedly leaked US confidential documents that appeared to be based on internal discussions among top South Korean officials is “untrue” and “altered.”

Deputy National Security Adviser Kim Tae-hyo made the remark as he departed for Washington ahead of President Yoon Suk Yeol’s state visit to the U.S. on April 26, stressing that the two countries’ alliance remained strong. Several documents have recently been posted on social media offering a partial, month-old snapshot of the war in Ukraine, including one that gives details of internal discussions among South Korean officials about US pressure on Seoul to help supply weapons to Ukraine.

“The two countries have a same assessment that much of the information disclosed is altered,” Kim told reporters, adding that the report on South Korea is “untrue.” He did not elaborate which part of the document was untrue.

A U.S. judge rejected requests to sever JPMorgan Chase & Co’s lawsuit accusing former executive Jes Staley of concealing what he knew about Jeffrey Epstein from two related lawsuits over its work for the late sex offender.

Monday’s decision by U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan is a defeat for Staley, who said the scheduled Oct. 23 trial for all three cases left him too little time to defend against JPMorgan’s “slanderous” accusations.

It is also a defeat for women who claim that Epstein sexually abused them and are suing the largest U.S. bank.

They claimed that JPMorgan sued Staley as a means to “harass and intimidate” them into revealing private medical records and communications in their case.

Epstein was a JPMorgan client from 2000 to 2013. The U.S. Virgin Islands, where the financier had a home, is also suing JPMorgan.

+ Walmart is suing Capital One in an attempt to end its credit-card contract with the bank.
+ The retailer said the McLean, Virginia-based bank has repeatedly failed to meet a number of contractual obligations in its card partnership deal, according to a lawsuit filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
+ Capital One “was consistently unable to meet the customer-service standards” outlined in its contract, such as issuing replacement cards and promptly processing payments and posting transactions, Walmart alleged in the suit.

Most Wall Street banks are likely to report lower quarterly earnings and face a dour outlook for the rest of the year, with last month’s regional banking crisis and a slowing economy expected to hurt profitability.

Earnings per share for the six biggest U.S. banks are expected to be down about 10% from a year earlier, analyst estimates from Refinitiv I/B/E/S show. Banks start reporting results on April 14.

Access to cheap deposits, which swelled for bigger banks as savers fled smaller lenders in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse last month, likely boosted net interest income for the largest banks, analysts said.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday officially declared Evan Gershkovich to be “wrongfully detained” by Russia. The Wall Street Journal reporter was arrested in Yekaterinburg last month and charged with espionage. “Journalism is not a crime. We condemn the Kremlin’s continued repression of independent voices in Russia, and its ongoing war against the truth,” State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said in a statement. Blinken’s designation means that the State Department will now involve its office that negotiates the release of “wrongfully detained” Americans abroad, and provide “all appropriate support” for Gershkovich.

Thousands of Israelis, including ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government, marched to an evacuated Jewish outpost in the West Bank on Monday in support of settlements viewed as illegal under international law. As tensions mounted between Israelis and Palestinians, Israelis from across the country travelled to the outpost of Evyatar while waving Israeli flags and chanting religious songs…

Germans appear to be particularly susceptible to what Bild described as Moscow’s “propaganda,” the newspaper said, adding that experts in the West are “alarmed” over this development. The tabloid then blamed this tendency on the “historically friendly relations” between the two nations, as well as the “legacy” of East Germany, which was once a part of the “socialist camp” and “a large number of Russian-speaking people” living in Germany nowadays. The paper then admitted that pro-Russian views have been spreading both among native Germans and the Russian-speaking part of the population.

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — The Iowa Attorney General’s Office has paused its practice of paying for emergency contraception — and in rare cases, abortions — for victims of sexual assault, a move that drew criticism from some victim advocates. Federal regulations and state law require Iowa to pay many of the expenses for sexual assault victims who seek medical…

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Texas judge who sparked a legal firestorm with an unprecedented ruling halting approval of the nation’s most common method of abortion is a former attorney for a religious liberty legal group with a long history pushing conservative causes.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, on Friday ordered a hold on federal approval of mifepristone in a decision that overruled decades of scientific approval. His ruling, which doesn’t take immediate effect, came practically at the same time that U.S. District Judge Thomas O. Rice, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, essentially ordered the opposite in a different case in Washington. The split likely puts the issue on an accelerated path to the U.S. Supreme Court.

  MOSCOW (AP) — Jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has been charged with espionage in Russia and has entered his official denial, Russian state news agency Tass reported Friday. Tass said a law enforcement source informed the news agency that Russia’s Federal Security Service officially charged the American journalist with espionage. Tass did not specify if the action…

Binance, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, is facing a lawsuit filed by the United States Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for allegedly violating US law by allowing US clients to trade on its platform without complying with Know Your Customer (KYC) standards. In the lawsuit, the CFTC identified three trading firms – Jane Street Group, Tower Research Capital, and Radix Trading – as Binance’s VIP clients, who allegedly received preferential treatment from the exchange.

According to Bloomberg, which cited “people familiar with the matter,” Radix Trading was identified as “Trading Firm A” in the CFTC’s suit, while Jane Street was “Trading Firm B” and Tower Research was “Trading Firm C.” The firms on the CFTC’s list were examples of US clients allegedly able to access Binance, despite not complying with KYC standards.

An estimated 60 tornadoes wreaked havoc across at least eight US states on Friday and over the weekend, destroying houses, felling trees, and flipping cars. Tennessee appeared to have been hit the hardest, with officials in McNairy County alone reporting nine deaths.  The local sheriff said that all the deceased were in the buildings destroyed by the disaster. In the same state, tornadoes killed one person in Tipton County, with 28 injured.  At least five people died in Arkansas, four in Illinois, and three in Indiana, according to officials. Authorities in Mississippi, Delaware, Ohio and Alabama reported one death per state. 

In Arkansas, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared a state of emergency while activating the National Guard to help with tornado response and asking for federal assistance.  In Belvidere, northern Illinois, a tornado led to the collapse of a roof at the Apollo Theatre, where spectators had gathered to listen to the metal band Morbid Angel, killing one and injuring 40 others.  The disaster also caused severe power outages, which on Saturday amounted to over one million customers, according to poweroutage.us. The bad weather also spilled over to other states, leaving more than 100,000 customers in Pennsylvania and tens of thousands in Ohio and West Virginia without electricity.

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.