United Kingdom
A focus on fraud, litigation and regulation.
My passion is for investigations.
Email: jacob.l.atk at gmail dot com
Singapore's High Court has sided with JP Morgan after the bank was sued for refusing to pay a coal trader under a letter of credit (LC) because it believed doing so would have violated US sanctions laws.
A lender owned by Russia's central bank has accused some of the world's biggest commodity traders, including Cargill, the Louis Dreyfus Company and Bunge, of complicity in an alleged US$3.2bn trade finance fraud aimed at circumventing Russian capital requirements.
Letters of indemnity enjoy wide usage in the oil trading business and allow cargoes to be sold quickly without waiting for paper bills of lading to arrive. But as Jacob Atkins reports, the failure of an oil trader two years ago shows how this practice can go badly wrong, leaving companies on the hook for ...
UniCredit is considering exiting commodity trade finance if it loses an appeal over a US$24.7mn loss on a financed oil trade that went awry, a lawyer representing the Italian lender has told a London court.
Danish shipping firm Torm has won a victory in its long-running battle to recoup US$14.9mn it had to pay French bank Natixis when stricken oil trader Gulf Petrochem failed to honour a letter of indemnity two years ago.
The EU looks set to abandon plans to more than double capital requirements for some trade finance instruments, delighting banks and corporates who have spent almost a year campaigning against the reforms.
UD Trading Group, the commodity trader accused by Trafigura of carrying out fraudulent nickel trades, was ordered by a Singapore court in January to pay US$63.3mn to a trade finance lender in a long-running dispute over the financing of metals.
The former treasury chief of a collapsed UK steel trader has told a jury in London that she did not know that the company allegedly created fake shipping and sales documents and deceived banks in order to secure trade finance as the company battled a liquidity crunch.
Australian bank ANZ has been awarded more than US$293.6mn in damages against two Hong Kong metal traders that supplied it with forged warehouse receipts for nickel in order to obtain financing.
A judge in Singapore has rejected claims by Italian lender UniCredit that commodities giant Glencore helped defraud it of US$37mn as part of a back-to-back trade with scandal-hit trader Hin Leong.
UK e-money firm Moorwand is facing claims from alleged investment fraud victims that it processed payments for two online trading scams, an investigation by PaymentsCompliance has found.
Payment gateways in Cyprus are providing services to more than two dozen fraudulent investment websites subject to scam warnings by UK and EU regulators, an investigation by VIXIO has found.
Holders of Estonia’s controversial cryptocurrency licences are being widely used by online investment scams to accept payments from victims, an investigation by VIXIO has found.
Soon after the UK financial watchdog gave a small payment institution licence to Allied Wallet in August 2010, the US payments processor found itself at the centre of an FBI investigation and agreed to forfeit $13.3m it had laundered for illegal online gambling websites.
On April 13 last year an unmarked wide-body passenger jet slowly climbed out of Sanford International Airport near Orlando, Florida, its four engines roaring as it set course across the Atlantic Ocean to Kazakhstan's commercial hub, Almaty.
A Saudi woman attempting to flee from her “abusive” family and seek asylum in Australia has reportedly been forcibly returned to Riyadh after being gagged, tied with duct tape and wrapped in a sheet by two uncles while on a stopover in the Philippines.
An Israeli weapons manufacturer sold hundreds of assault rifles to anti-drug police in the Philippines just months after President Rodrigo Duterte compared himself to Hitler and said he would be "happy to slaughter" three million drug addicts, information gathered by i24NEWS shows.
Israel could soon lose its privileged status as the only country in the world to enjoy immunity from publicly available high resolution satellite imagery, potentially exposing details of secret military sites but opening up new fields of environmental and archaeological research.
Insurance provider the Bond & Credit Company is disputing US$10.5mn in trade credit claims from a Swiss bank, arguing that it should not be liable for payment because the commodity trade transactions it insured were fictitious.
A UK High Court judge has found that ED&F Man was the victim of a warehouse receipts fraud that ensnared multiple banks in 2017, and has awarded the commodities trading house US$282mn in damages. The fraud, which became public in mid-2017, involved nickel stored at London Metals Exchange warehouses across Asia.
A court in Australia has heard claims that documents underpinning a financing arrangement for collapsed trader Phoenix Commodities may have been fabricated.
Companies transporting crude oil to Israel have adopted increasingly clandestine methods in order to disguise their origins in the oilfields of Iraq's Kurdistan region, according to an industry watchdog. Israel has been the chief buyer of Kurdish crude oil, i24NEWS reported last year, although more recent figures show that the trade has slumped since Kurdistan's independence bid fizzled and the central government in Baghdad recaptured key oil fields.
French banking giant Crédit Agricole has lost an attempt to claw back US$23.6mn it lost as part of a fraud perpetrated by collapsed Singapore commodities trader ZenRock.
Israel has been the top buyer of crude oil from the Kurdish region of northern Iraq this year, according to shipping data and interviews with industry analysts, in a murky trade that underpins the Jewish state's unique position as a supporter of the Kurdish Regional Government's (KRG) hotly contested independence referendum last month.
Not one refugee has been able to take advantage of a loophole in the federal government's long-held vow never to permanently settle asylum seekers who arrived in Australia by boat, new figures show.
Those who publicly renounce their religion often find themselves shunned by family and friends. Women from Saudi Arabia who renounce Islam find loved ones can morph into mortal enemies — with the law on their side. In defiance of a male guardianship system that places strict limits on their movements, a small band of Saudi women has fled to the West. They have adopted the label “ex-Saudi”, alongside “ex-Muslim”. Four share their story with Inquirer.
After almost six months stranded in the United Kingdom due to border closures caused by the coronavirus, Australian psychologist Sandi James said her mental health was at a low ebb. When she saw a Facebook post from fellow Australian Jordann Barge offering a free place to stay for those stuck in the UK, Ms James jumped on a train to the small town of Cullompton in south-west England.
Many Thai workers employed on Israeli farms near the Gaza border were forced to continue working by their bosses Thursday despite a barrage of rocket fire and the Israeli military saying agricultural activity should be halted.
An Australian agriculture finance provider is suing insurer the Bond and Credit Company (BCC) for refusing to honour a claim for A$7.3mn owed by collapsed Dubai-based commodities trader Phoenix Commodities.
Senior members of OneCoin, the alleged $4bn Ponzi scheme based on a non-existent cryptocurrency, recently obtained permission to operate virtual currency exchanges and provide digital wallets in Estonia - and the licensing regulator says it is powerless to act because of the country's "fundamentally flawed" laws.
Last year Emerson* left Peru for the first time. Arriving in Israel, he was immediately smitten with what he described as the country's respect for the law, organization and culture. The 33-year-old liked it so much, he decided to stay.
UK e-money firm ePayments Systems suspended all customer activity on Tuesday after a review by the Financial Conduct Authority found “a number of weaknesses” in its anti-money laundering controls, the company said.
A European Parliament report this week will raise red flags about a surge in cryptocurrency licences to largely offshore applicants in Estonia, whose financial regulators are already under intense scrutiny over their handling of the Danske Bank money laundering scandal
It’s 2022. Israel has annexed 60 per cent of the West Bank and bestowed citizenship on the 150,000 or so Palestinians living there. The rest of the long-disputed territory is under the control of an autonomous Palestinian leadership that has a capital in Ramallah. Every day hundreds of thousands of Palestinians travel to their jobs in the undivided Jewish capital of Jerusalem
A Caribbean bank that provided offshore accounts has sued Mastercard for allegedly pushing it into liquidation when the card scheme revoked its licence to issue payment cards.
Clothing retailers that have stopped buying cotton sourced from Xinjiang may still be using forced labour in their supply chains through companies in China that process imported cotton, the US customs agency believes.
Companies operating cargo flights between Iran and Syria are increasingly catching the attention of Israeli and US intelligence, officials have said, as Iran's threats to avenge an alleged Israeli strike in Syria earlier this month throw renewed attention on how weapons and other tools flow between the two allies.
The culprit behind almost six hundred hoax bomb and shooting threats that terrorised Australian schools over the past year has been identified as an Israeli teenager working from his suburban bedroom, who allegedly raked in a small fortune by making the hoax calls for anonymous buyers on the ‘dark net’ website Alphabay.
Australia’s overseas spy agency is carrying out a major overhaul of its technology and the way it trains its agents to deal with a surge of Islamic extremism in Southeast Asia.
EXCLUSIVE: He paid $11,500 to a people-smuggler, spent 37 hours crammed into an asylum-seeker boat, six months on Christmas Island and just over three years in the Manus Island processing centre.
Chinese contractors developing projects in Africa have recently begun seeking out financing from European banks and export credit agencies (ECAs), a departure from their typical sourcing of finance from China. Sources in the export finance sector say there are various reasons for the trend, including Chinese official lenders and insurers such as the Export-Import Bank ...
Payment service providers in the UK have been left scrambling to find new banking partners after BFC Bank, one of the sector's top providers of business and client safeguarding accounts, last week began terminating its relationships with payment and e-money institutions.
At 17, Yochai Greenfeld choreographed and directed a lauded high school adaptation of "All That Jazz" from Chicago, but as his schoolmates burst onto stage, premiering the result of his weeks of work, Yochai was winding through the hills outside Jerusalem, on his way to a retreat that he hoped would help him stop being gay.
Israel's exports to Gulf Arab states were worth some one billion dollars in 2016, a new analysis of trade data suggests, despite their refusal to recognize Israel or have diplomatic relations with it.
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For Ruslana Panukhyk, just one broken nose at the hands of ultra-nationalist hoodlums was something to be proud of. That was the injury tally for last year's pride march in the Ukrainian capital Kiev, the first since its inception that came off without major biff (said nose notwithstanding) or violent counter-demonstrations.
Trans Asiatic Oil (TAO), a state-owned Israeli company, has the distinction of having every single Israeli ambassador to Iran sitting on its board. But there's a catch -- they are all dead.
Two investigations into possible breaches of the UK’s money laundering regulations are underway at electronic money institutions, PaymentsCompliance can reveal.
Australia’s fifth largest market for live exports is at risk as Animals Australia launches a campaign in Israel aimed at turning public opinion against accepting shipments of Australian cattle and sheep.
The European Union’s cap on interchange fees for card payments has successfully pushed down costs for merchants and consumers but competition benefits have been muted, a study underpinning Brussels’s looming review of the Interchange Fee Regulation (IFR) has found.
During his official visit to Israel this week, Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull will demand justice for three sisters whose alleged serial sexual abuser is living free in the city of Bnei Brak after successfully avoiding extradition by checking herself into psychiatric care on the day of her scheduled court appearances.
The United States slapped sanctions Monday on an Israeli company over links to a Russian firm accused of buttressing the "offensive cyber capabilities" of Russia's intelligence service, the FSB.
Intense scrutiny in Australia on a surge in firms offering interest-free “buy now, pay later” products at the point of sale is shaping up as a test case for if or how the burgeoning sector should be regulated, as a titan of the industry kicks off its global expansion.
Christians in the northern Iraqi city of Qaraqosh knew their time was up on a midsummer’s day two years ago. Black-and-white flags appeared on the horizon, fluttering above a fleet of Toyotas commanded by a multinational gang of Islamist extremists.
An Israeli man accused by the United States of selling US-made military equipment to Iran cannot be extradited from Israel because he is too ill to fly, his lawyer has told a court in Connecticut.
In the summer of 2017, Zelim Bakaev flew home to his native Chechnya from Moscow, where he was building a career as a pop singer and model.
A plane carrying up to 180 passengers was forced to take evasive action to avoid a multi-rotor drone on approach to Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport in June, with the pilots performing a safe landing despite being unsure if the aircraft had been hit.
The US hit a raft of organizations in Egypt, Iran and Syria with sanctions for trading arms with North Korea on Thursday, including a state-owned Egyptian company suspected to have made a clandestine purchase of thousands of rocket propelled grenades from the hermit kingdom.
In the winter of 2013, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak stepped across the Egyptian border at Rafah and made a rare visit by a head of government to Hamas-ruled Gaza. Razak, whose country does not have diplomatic relations with Israel, told reporters: "We believe in the struggle of the Palestinian people.
Unlike Russians, Germans, Greeks and Armenians, Korean Christians don't have their own quarter or Old City cathedral, but they are a growing and often strongly Zionist community in Jerusalem.
Bill Shorten has stared down increasingly vocal pro-Palestinian sentiment inside Labor, saying he is “relaxed” about spending just two hours in the Palestinian territories while on a three-day paid visit to Israel.