GRC Report Staff

The U.S. Department of Justice recently announced a settlement with EagleBank, which agreed to pay more than $9.7 million after admitting it willfully failed to maintain an anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) program required under the Bank Secrecy Act. The resolution comes in the form of a non-prosecution agreement covering conduct that stretched from 2010 through 2021.

From July 1, the Financial Reporting Council revised Audit Enforcement Procedure is officially in force, replacing a framework that often left investigations following the same procedural track regardless of whether a case was straightforward, contested or somewhere in between. The changes do not expand the FRC's enforcement powers. They expand its options.

The market had been told to expect a profitable year. On Feb. 28, 2023, Regional Express Holdings assured investors it remained "optimistic the Group will have positive operating profits for the full FY23 barring any further external shocks." Four months later, that confidence had dissolved into a forecast of a $24.2 million (AUD $35 million) operating loss. The question before the Supreme Court of New South Wales was not whether Rex's fortunes had changed. Businesses disappoint their own expectations all the time. The question was when the company knew its optimism no longer rested on reasonable grounds, and whether investors should have been told sooner.

If an app developer builds a product and acquires a customer, who owns that relationship? The developer who created the service, or the platform that stands between the two? The UK's Competition and Markets Authority believes the answer has drifted too far toward the latter.

Australia's financial intelligence agency has released a series of new threat assessments that argue the challenge facing anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing professionals is no longer simply identifying suspicious transactions. Increasingly, the reports suggest, the greater difficulty lies in recognizing illicit activity that has been carefully embedded within legitimate commerce.

The UK Financial Conduct Authority published the final rules governing firms that buy, trade, safeguard and issue cryptoassets, completing the policy framework that will underpin the country's new regulatory regime. The package reaches well beyond anti-money laundering controls and financial promotions, bringing prudential requirements, market conduct standards and consumer protections into a sector that has long operated under a narrower form of oversight.

For months the world's attention has drifted toward the Strait of Hormuz with the uneasy awareness reserved for places that are both geographically small and economically immense. The waterway has always been more than a shipping route. It is a pressure point. When conflict interrupts traffic there, the consequences do not remain in the Gulf for long. They surface weeks later in warehouses, procurement meetings and production schedules half a world away, where businesses discover that the shortest distance between a geopolitical crisis and an empty shelf is often a container ship that never arrived.