Category: Investigations

When Member of Parliament Kenny Chiu was contacted by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) ahead of Canada’s federal election in 2021, he was puzzled. He had never expected to be part of a CSIS investigation, let alone one that required an in-person talk at the height of Canada’s COVID-19 pandemic. “At that time, everything had moved online, so it was quite unexpected that they insisted on a face-to-face sit-down,” Chiu told Al Jazeera. But the topic of the meeting was highly…

The Department of Defense has sent over a criminal referral to the DOJ to trigger the probe, according to Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh. Meanwhile, an internal investigation has been launched to “review and assess the validity” of the documents, which “appear to contain sensitive and highly classified material.”  Photographs of scanned briefing slides were first posted on a messaging platform called Discord in January, but went unnoticed until last week. Since then, more documents have appeared on Twitter and Telegram as well, with the latest batch emerging on Friday.  According to Financial Times, their release has “sown chaos and paranoia among Washington’s national security apparatus ahead of a critical moment” in the Ukraine conflict, just as Kiev is about to launch a highly anticipated “counter-offensive.”

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.

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.

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.”

Epstein, who died in a prison cell in 2021 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, had been a client at JPMorgan for 15 years, from 1998 to 2013. The last five years of those were after he’d pleaded guilty in Florida of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. The lawsuits against JPMorgan claim that Dimon as CEO had knowingly allowed continued cooperation with Epstein, ignoring internal warnings about his illegal behavior. According to a report by the Financial Times, during the pretrial process investigators found communications between JPMorgan employees that mentioned a “Dimon review” of the bank’s relationship with Epstein. The bank, however, denied that Dimon had any knowledge of such a review. A source within JPMorgan with knowledge of the bank’s internal probe into the matter, told the news outlet there was no record of the CEO being in direct communication with Epstein.

According to the reports, Dimon agreed to be interviewed under oath about the lawsuits. His sworn deposition, will reportedly take place in May, behind closed doors.

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.

Last week, Denmark’s Foreign Minister Lars Rasmussen announced that his government could corroborate a report by the Russian gas giant Gazprom, the operator of the undersea pipeline, about a strange object found near Nord Stream 2. The company sent pictures of the item to Danish authorities, while the Russian government made a formal inquiry through its embassy, the minister said. Copenhagen treats the discovery seriously and will investigate further, Rasmussen pledged at the time.

The object was mentioned last week by Russian President Vladimir Putin in a TV interview. He said it was found during a Gazprom survey about 30 kilometers away from where the pipeline was breached. The device may be an antenna used in remotely detonating a charge, the president suggested, citing experts.

Moscow asked for permission to explore further, Putin added, necessary because the object is located in Denmark’s exclusive zone. Russia could organize a mission “on its own, jointly with [the Danes], or, better yet, with an international group of experts in explosives who are trained to work at such depth.” Rasmussen said such permission would not be granted, triggering a rebuke from the Russian Foreign Ministry.

The railroad at the heart of the hazardous train crash near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border offered vague answers Monday about who agreed to burn the derailed cars carrying vinyl chloride.

Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw told the Senate Veterans Affairs and Emergency Preparedness Committee that a unified command team – led by a local fire chief in East Palestine, Ohio and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine – OK’d the “controlled release” plan on Feb. 6 to prevent a dangerous explosion that would have spread contaminants and deadly shrapnel across the region.

Majority Chairman Doug Mastriano, R-Chambersburg, questioned the use of “controlled” to describe the railroad’s decision to set the train cars on fire and watch plumes of smoke drift for miles over homes and farmland.

“You’re blaming it on a chief in East Palestine, correct?” he said. “So your cars are on fire, it’s your rail, it’s your incident and you’re going to leave it to a local fire chief who’s likley never had to deal with this before?”

A new lawsuit accuses Mark Zuckerberg and other Meta Platforms Inc executives and directors of failing to do enough to stop sex trafficking and child sexual exploitation on Facebook and Instagram. The complaint made public late Monday by several pension and investment funds that own Meta stock said Meta’s leadership and board have failed to protect the company’s and shareholders’ interests by turning a blind eye to “systemic evidence” of criminal activity.

Given the board’s failure to explain how it tries to root out the problem, “the only logical inference is that the board has consciously decided to permit Meta’s platforms to promote and facilitate sex/human trafficking,” the complaint said. Meta rejected the basis for the lawsuit, which was filed in Delaware Chancery Court.

Meta, based in Menlo Park, California, has long faced accusations that its platforms are a haven for sexual misconduct.

The first lawsuit against JP Morgan, filed by an unnamed “Jane Doe” representing a group of the pedophile’s victims, argues the US-based bank “knowingly benefited from participating in a sex trafficking venture” led by Epstein, who was a client there from 1998 through 2013, and “negligently failed to exercise reasonable care to prevent physical harm.”  The US Virgin Islands’ own suit against JP Morgan alleges the bank enabled the late predator’s sex trafficking operation, though Judge Rakoff also threw out three of the four claims in that suit. 

Eight of the 12 claims from Doe’s lawsuit against Deutsche Bank, which took on Epstein as a client in 2013, even though he had been a registered sex offender since 2008, were also dismissed.  Rakoff’s decision allows the plaintiffs to pursue further pretrial discovery. Former JP Morgan CEO Jes Staley, a central figure in both lawsuits against the bank who resigned in 2021 over his links with Epstein, is reportedly due to be deposed later this week. Court filings show he exchanged over 1,200 emails with Epstein, with more than a few referencing young women. Last week, Rakoff tentatively scheduled trial dates for both JP Morgan cases for October 23.

German and US authorities, supported by Europol, have targeted ChipMixer, a cryptocurrency mixer used to keep crypto transactions private. The investigation was also supported by Belgium, Poland and Switzerland. On 15 March, national authorities took down the infrastructure of the platform, seizing 4 servers, and also seizing about 1909 Bitcoins in 55 transactions (approx. EUR 44.2 million) and 7 TB of data.

Silicon Valley Bank’s parent company and two senior executives are facing a class-action lawsuit in the United States, where shareholders have accused the financial institution of failing to disclose the risks that anticipated interest rate hikes would have on its business.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Northern District of California on Monday, is seeking unspecified damages from SVB Financial Group and its Chief Financial Officer Daniel Beck, as well as the bank’s Chief Executive Officer Greg Becker.

The bank collapsed and its assets were seized by the US government late last week after a mass withdrawal of funds by customers.

The lawsuit, which accuses SVB of violating federal securities laws, noted that the Federal Reserve, the US central bank, had signaled as early as 2021 that it would increase interest rates to tame inflation.