Panama Papers law firm Mossack Fonseca sues Netflix over The Laundromat

Partners Jurgen Mossack and Ramon Fonseca want US court to stop the film being released on Friday.

In a US lawsuit filed on Tuesday, Jurgen Mossack and Ramon Fonseca say The Laundromat, in which they are respectively played by Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas, portrays them as “ruthless uncaring lawyers who are involved in money laundering, tax evasion, bribery and/or other criminal conduct” and ask the court to stop it from being screened.

Mossack Fonseca shut down in March last year, two years after the release of the Panama Papers thrust the affairs of their clients onto front pages around the world.

The 11.5m documents in the cache named a large number of rich and powerful people, sparking investigations around the world.

In addition to the Panamanian charges against Mossack and Fonseca, which they are fighting, four men associated with the firm have been charged with tax crimes in the US. read more »

SEC Charges 18 Traders in $31 Million Stock Manipulation Scheme

The Securities and Exchange Commission has filed an emergency action and obtained an asset freeze against 18 traders in a scheme to manipulate more than 3,000 U.S.-listed securities for over $31 million in illicit profits.

The SEC alleges that the traders, who are primarily based in China, manipulated the prices of thousands of thinly traded securities by creating the false appearance of trading interest and activity in those stocks, thereby enabling them to reap illicit profits by artificially boosting or depressing stock prices. For example, according to the SEC's complaint, the traders used multiple accounts to place several small sell orders to drive down a stock’s price before using a different set of accounts to buy larger amounts of the stock at the artificially low prices. After accumulating their position, the traders then flipped the script and placed several small buy orders to push up prices so they could then sell their stock at artificially high prices. read more »

CFTC Charges Nevada Company and its Owner in $11 Million Cryptocurrency Fraud and Misappropriation Scheme

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission today announced the filing of a civil enforcement action in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada, charging David Gilbert Saffron of Las Vegas, Nevada and Circle Society, Corp., a Nevada corporation, with fraudulent solicitation, misappropriation, and registration violations relating to an $11 million binary options scheme Saffron operated through Circle Society.

The complaint charges that from at least December 2017 to the present, the defendants fraudulently solicited and accepted at least $11 million worth of bitcoin and U.S. dollars from individuals in the United States to trade off-exchange binary options on foreign currencies (“forex”) and cryptocurrency pairs, among other things.  According to the complaint, the defendants fraudulently solicited funds from at least fourteen members of the public to participate in a pool operated by Circle Society, an entity Saffron created and used to perpetrate his fraud, by making false claims of Saffron’s trading expertise and guaranteeing rates of return up to 300%.  Rather than using pool participants’ funds to trade in binary options contracts as promised, the defendants misappropriated funds, including by retaining participants’ funds in Saffron’s personal electronic cryptocurrency wallet and by using funds to pay other participants, in the manner of a Ponzi scheme.  The defendants then lied to participants in order to conceal their misappropriation. read more »