The Sanctions Ledger

The ContextOn 3 January 2026, the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro triggered renewed forensic examination of Tether’s (USDT) financial flows. The audit trail is clear. Since 2020, Venezuela’s state oil company (PDVSA) has used USDT to bypass...

The Deceptive Interface: A $2.5bn Legal Verdict

The Context In September 2025, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) secured a historic $2.5 billion settlement against Amazon.com, Inc. The enforcement action named Senior Vice President Neil Lindsay and Vice President Jamil Ghani as individual defendants. The core...

The Weaponised Appointment

The Weaponised AppointmentA Meta appointment reveals a new vector for reputational contagion.The ContextOn 12 January 2026, Meta announced Dina Powell McCormick as its new president and vice chairman. The appointment leverages her “deep Washington ties”...

The $15bn Jurisdictional Gap

The ContextUS$15 billion in bitcoin sits in US custody. The individual at the centre of the associated fraud, Chen Zhi, was extradited from Cambodia to China in January 2026. The US Department of Justice unsealed its indictment in October 2025, alleging a global fraud...

The Settlement: A Blueprint for Liability

The ContextOn 8 January 2026, a Paris court approved a €267.5 million settlement with HSBC France. The bank paid to resolve a criminal and civil investigation into its alleged role in ‘CumCum’ dividend tax fraud schemes from 2014 to 2019. The settlement...

Trust: The First Casualty

The Context A cybercriminal group called “Kazu” accessed the ‘My Health Documents’ module of the ManageMyHealth platform in late December 2025. They stole over 400,000 sensitive health documents—referrals, test results, discharge summaries—and...