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The Obama administration has announced a set of financial regulations that would force companies to disclose more information about their owners, part of an effort billed as a crackdown on tax evaders and money launderers. Administration officials announced the new rules Thursday as Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew urged Congress to pass legislation that would further enhance transparency in the U.S. banking system and help law enforcement track down secret owners. […] A second proposed rule would close a loophole that allows a narrow class of foreign-owned companies to avoid reporting to the IRS. […] Treasury also sent new legislation to...

The European Central Bank announced Wednesday that it will phase out the 500 euro banknote because of concerns that this banknote "could facilitate illicit activities" ... Europe's top law enforcement officials maintain that the 500 euro banknote (worth about $576) makes it easy for criminals to launder money since it's so easy to move around undetected. In a report last year, Europol said cash was still the "instrument of choice" for terrorists and 500 euro notes were in high demand, though they're not popular for everyday transactions. ...

BURLINGTON, Vt. – U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, on Monday criticized a Hillary Clinton campaign fundraising scheme that state party leaders told Politico has been used as a self-serving “money-laundering” conduit. Despite Clinton’s pledges to rebuild state parties, Politico found that less than 1 percent of the $61 million raised by the Victory Fund has stayed in the state parties’ coffers. “Secretary Clinton is looting funds meant for the state parties to skirt fundraising limits on her presidential campaign,” Weaver said. “We think the Clinton campaign should let the state parties keep their fair share of the...

So much of America's future is at stake in the 2016 presidential election. But let's focus for a moment on just one area--energy and the environment--where the Obama administration has made startling progress.... Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, arguably President Obama's best Cabinet appointment, has been leading a quiet revolution in clean-energy technology. Innovation is transforming this industry, costs are plummeting and entrepreneurs are devising radical new systems that create American jobs--in addition to protecting the planet.... Here's a suggestion for any fact-based, technology-respecting candidate in either party: Promise that, if elected, you'll try to persuade Moniz to remain in place.......

The German government on Monday said it hoped the revelations from the so-called “Panama Papers” will spur global efforts to combat tax evasion and money laundering. “We hope the current debate will turn up the heat,” finance ministry spokesman Martin Jäger told a news briefing. […] The Panama Papers are a massive leak of 11.5 million documents allegedly exposing the secret offshore dealings of a host of world leaders, celebrities and sports stars, implicating figures from Russian President Vladimir Putin to Barcelona striker Lionel Messi. […] The documents, from around 214,000 offshore entities covering almost 40 years, came from Mossack...

China launders cash of foreign criminals Gangs and cartels from allover the world have laundered billions in China, slipping their ill-gotten gains into the great tides of legitimate trade and finance Ashdod, Israel: Scam artists, drug cartels and gangs from around the world have found a new haven for laundering money: China. The country’s well-developed underground financial networks have caught the attention of foreign criminals who are using China to clean their dirty money and pump it back into the global financial system—largely beyond the reach of Western law enforcement, an Associated Press investigation has found.

If you still own shares in solar energy it’s probably a sign that you’ve been in the sun too long: the sector is tanking – and deservedly so – as reality dawns that this is a Potemkin industry, an Enron of a con-trick, whose survival depends not on the energy it generates but on the subsidies it squeezes from the taxpayer. Consider Exhibit A: the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the California desert. This $2.2 billion project, heavily backed with federal grants by the Obama administration, is absolutely brilliant at killing birds. According to some estimates it accounts for...

California regulators may force a massive solar thermal power plant in the Mojave Desert to shut down after years of under-producing electricity — not to mention the plant was blinding pilots flying over the area and incinerating birds. The Ivanpah solar plant could be shut down if state regulators don’t give it more time to meet electricity production promises it made as part of its power purchase agreements with utilities, according to The Wall Street Journal. Ivanpah, which got a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the Obama administration, only produced a fraction of the power state regulators expected it would....

The following is a script from "Anonymous, Inc." which aired on Jan. 31, 2016. Steve Kroft is the correspondent. Graham Messick and Kevin Livelli, producers. If you like crime dramas and movies with international intrigue, then you probably have a basic understanding of money laundering. It's how dictators, drug dealers, corrupt politicians, and other crooks avoid getting caught by transforming their ill-gotten gains into assets that appear to be legitimate. They do it by moving the dirty money through a maze of dummy corporations and offshore bank accounts that conceal their identity and the source of the funds. And most...

Islamic Cleric May Be Laundering Taxpayer Money Into Clinton Campaign - Hillary Under Pressure To Return Donations A mysterious Turkish Islamic cleric - whose followers have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hillary Clinton's family foundation and to her presidential campaign - is being accused of ordering the false imprisonment of three followers of a competing religious sect, according to documents filed in federal court earlier this week. The cleric, Fethullah Gulen, has lived in Pennsylvania's Pocono mountains since 1998, when he went into exile from Turkey amid accusations that he plotted to undermine the secular regime that was...

JP Morgan Chase, one of America’s leading banks, has closed down an account held by the Vatican bank at its Italian branch office in Milan. Neither the American bank nor the Vatican bank (formally known as the Institute for Religious Works, or IOR) offered any public comment on the move. But officials at JP Morgan Chase acknowledged that the IOR account was closed because of concerns about the possible use of the Vatican bank for money-laundering.

FULL TITLE: US scraps its $500million programme to train 'moderate' Syrian rebels after producing fewer than 80 soldiers, most of whom were either shot or ran away The U.S. has scrapped its $500 million program to train moderate rebels after it produced fewer than 80 fighters, most of whom had been killed or fled. U.S. Defence Secretary Ash Carter said Washington would instead work more closely with capable Kurdish and other forces in Syria. No details were immediately available, but the programme to train and equip moderate Syrian rebels to fight the Islamic State group is widely considered a failure....

This past weekend we called Obama's latest failed attempt to replace Syria's president (after a comparable attempt in 2013 also ended in failure) for what it is: "Make no mistake, this is shaping up to be the most spectacular US foreign policy debacle since Vietnam - and we don't think that's an exaggeration." Some of our high level observations: The US, in conjunction with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, attempted to train and support Sunni extremists to overthrow the Assad regime. Some of those Sunni extremists ended up going crazy and declaring a Medeival caliphate putting the Pentagon and Langley in...

<p>During a normal check at Lamezia Terme, the rapper was found with $422,820 in U.S. cash, a police source told CNN. The maximum amount of cash that passengers traveling through Italy can carry without declaring it is €10,000 ($11,010.25). The rules were put in place to prevent money laundering.</p>

The reaction from around the Twitterverse to news that a university paid $65,000 for Chelsea Clinton to make a brief appearance in 2014 can largely be summed up in one word. What?! Tuesday morning, the Washington Post reported the University of Missouri at Kansas City was looking for a celebrity speaker to headline a gala luncheon, and initially reached out to Hillary Clinton. But when Clinton’s representatives quoted a fee of $275,000, officials balked. So they turned to the Democratic presidential front-runner’s daughter. As reported by the Post, the university paid $65,000 for Chelsea Clinton’s appearance.

Welcome to the age of vanity politics and campaigns-for-hire. What would our founders make of this nightmare? Four qualities have distinguished republican government from ancient Athens forward: the sovereignty of the people; a sense of the common good; government dedicated to the commonwealth; and resistance to corruption. Measured against the standards established for republics from ancient times, the American Republic is massively corrupt. From Plato and Aristotle forward, corruption was meant to describe actions and decisions that put a narrow, special, or personal interest ahead of the interest of the public or commonwealth. Corruption did not have to stoop to...

John Holdren, President Barack Obama’s top science and technology advisor, said at a White House summit on clean energy on Tuesday that a “global low-carbon economy” by the year 2050 means that “cars, trucks and planes” will be powered by “electricity, biofuels or hydrogen.” “As we all know, a global low-carbon economy in 2050 is going to have to meet the energy needs of 9 or 10 billion people using technologies that will have to be more advanced than the technologies that are in place today,” he said. “Buildings, agriculture, machines must be dramatically more energy-efficient.” “Cars, trucks and planes...

Are the NYT's and James Risen at fault here? Investigators of the failed car bombing in Times Square are looking for a money courier they say helped funnel cash from overseas to finance a Pakistani-American's preparations to blow up the crude gasoline-and-propane bomb in the heart of New York, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press. Investigators have the name of the courier they believe helped Faisal Shahzad pay for the used SUV and other materials to rig up a car bomb that would have caused a huge fireball in Times Square if it had gone off, the official...

Bill Clinton's foundation set up a fundraising arm in Sweden that collected $26 million in donations at the same time that country was lobbying Hillary Clinton's State Department to forgo sanctions that threatened its thriving business with Iran, according to interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Times... (June 02 2015)

As more money continues to flow into the pockets of Mexican drug cartels, traffickers need to maintain a solid network of places—often along the southwest border—where they can launder drug money. However, in an attempt to stymie these efforts, several major US banks have been closing numerous branches in the region and shutting down hundreds of customer accounts. According to a WSJ report, the Arizona border town of Nogales, population 21,000, is feeling the financial pinch most strongly. In the past several months, J.P. Morgan, Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc.-owned Banamex USA have shut a total of four...