After spending far too much time, lately, thinking about correspondent banking and sanctions, I've finally started writing some of it down publicly. First piece below on the case of a bank in Russia and a bank in Laos. evidenceofabsence.substack.com/p/laos-in-tr...

1. 🤦‍♀️ It is deeply concerning & frustrating that govt is once again being led down the garden path to reintroduce ‘golden visas’. Last summer, we wrote to the Chancellor with @ukanticorruptioncoalition.org highlighting golden visa’s illicit finance risks & lack of economic benefit. 🧵

“The new US crypto bill coupled with US-based crypto-denominated prediction markets points towards the USA becoming a gigantic offshore enabler of corruption for the rest of the world; a digital version of what Switzerland was” - @oliverbullough.bsky.social www.codastory.com/oligarchy/cr...

Vanuatu now largely compliant with OECD Global Forum's AML/CFT rules - but is only partially compliant on availability of ownership data. Several recommendations focus on legal and beneficial ownership information including about trusts and foundations fca.vu/global-forum...

New Zealand's AML/CFT Amendment Act came into effect on 19 May 2026. It amends the country's definition of a beneficial owner to focus on effective control and updates verification rules for customer due diligence and enhanced checks www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2... #beneficialownership

OpenAI has released a research tool to verify OpenAI-generated images openai.com/research/ver... Background: openai.com/index/advanc... Useful for #OSINT purposes cc @craigsilverman.bsky.social

Billionaire Trump donor in line to make millions from Thames Water bid

Beginning today, the UK government will loosen sanctions on Russian oil refined into diesel and jet fuel in third countries, as prices continue to rise www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The Netherlands is moving forwards with its Implementation Act on the Prevention of Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing to transpose rules from the EU's Sixth Anti-Money Laundering Directive and to align with the Anti-Money Laundering Regulation www.linkedin.com/posts/stephe... #AMLR #6AMLD

Serbia's Law on the Central Registry of Beneficial Owners is "full of illogicality, absurdity and does not produce results", reports Radio 021 www.021.rs/info/biznis-...

GPH! V2:E7: "From Dirty Money to Clean Data: Entity Resolution, Beneficial Ownership, and Sanctions in the Fight Against Illicit Finance" featuring @stephenabbottpugh.bsky.social Thu Jun 04, 11:00 US Eastern watch.getcontrast.io/register/sen... #Senzing

The European Union has issued a €5m call for proposals to improve the availability and use of data, methodologies and tools for measuring corruption risks, trends and the impact of anti-corruption measures ec.europa.eu/info/funding...

Shell companies. Proxy owners. Fragmented registries. Ahead of UK Illicit Finance Summit due at the end of June, I'll be joining @pacoid.bsky.social for an edition of Senzing's #GraphPowerHour to talk #beneficialownership, sanctions, PEPs and more. Sign up: watch.getcontrast.io/register/sen...

For 15 years, OGP members have worked to make it harder to hide corruption and easier to follow the money. From Nigeria to Armenia to Canada, beneficial ownership reforms are revealing who really owns companies and profits from public contracts. Link bit.ly/ending-anonymous-ownership

Companies House targets for 2026/27: 1) Clean up the register by scaling up automated data quality metrics 2) Scale up data sharing efforts 3) Complete ID verification rollout 4) Targeted enforcement action against those misusing the register www.gov.uk/government/p...

The Call for Proposals for the first Open Technology Research (OTR) Symposium 2026 is OPEN until July 5! 📅 26–27 Oct 2026 📍 Barcelona, Spain 🔗 Register/Submit: symposium.opentechresearch.org More info ⬇️ opentechresearch.org/blog/otr-res...

Deep foreign aid cuts have allowed the deadly Ebola virus to spread undetected in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, experts warn. Ongoing conflict has complicated efforts to build resilient health care services in the region, they add.

Great work continuing to make it easy to use data from @ukparliament.parliament.uk api.parliament.uk/procedure-br... beta-search.parliament.uk

Big day for judgments from the Court of Justice of the European Union this Thursday: 1) Beneficial ownership, trusts and legitimate interest in Italy (C-684/24) Italy's beneficial ownership register has been suspended for years pending this decision infocuria.curia.europa.eu/tabs/affair?...

Nigeria’s beneficial ownership regime at risk as banks allow inactive companies to run accounts New report from the Premium Times finds that 3,688,101 of Nigeria's 7,039,099 registered entities are classified as inactive, according to official data www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlin...

New Indonesian journal study proposes the need for a new legal policy model that positions the beneficial owner as a subject who can be held criminally liable to support tax crime enforcement in the country journal.contrariusactus.com/index.php/JS...

Denmark's Central Business Register (Det Centrale Virksomhedsregister - aka CVR) will phase out several services currently accessed via its REST API by the end of 2026 in favour of GraphQL confluence.sdfi.dk/pages/viewpa... Find out more: confluence.sdfi.dk/display/DML/...

OpenCheck now displays emissions data for energy companies as well as showing which companies they are owned by, thanks to open data from @globalenergymon.bsky.social and @climatetrace.org opencheck.onrender.com Find out more www.linkedin.com/posts/stephe... #LEI #opendata #GODIN #ESG #climatedata

Discover OpenCheck opencheck.onrender.com Customer due diligence risk checks driven by the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) and open data - mapped to the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard. #LEI #opendata #openstandards #CDD #AMLR #AMLA #GODIN

BREAKING: Reform UK leader Nigel Farage bought a £1.4 million property in cash shortly after receiving a £5m personal gift from billionaire donor Christopher Harborne, according to property records seen by Sky News.

OpenCheck now displays emissions data for energy companies as well as showing which companies they are owned by, thanks to open data from @globalenergymon.bsky.social and @climatetrace.org opencheck.onrender.com Find out more www.linkedin.com/posts/stephe... #LEI #opendata #GODIN #ESG #climatedata

Government officials and experts from 11 jurisdictions across the Asia Pacific region participated in a virtual seminar organised by the OECD and Asian Development Bank yesterday to discuss key considerations in centralising beneficial ownership information www.oecd.org/en/networks/...

OpenCheck now updated to make better use of open data from @dataresearchcenter.bsky.social's OpenAleph and parent organisation relationship statements from @wikidatacommunity.bsky.social. Test it out: opencheck.onrender.com stephenabbottpugh.medium.com/introducing-... #LEI #opendata #GODIN

🤖 AI + Wikidata - how AI can serve open knowledge: PoliLoom: large-language models (LLMs) extract politician data from Wikipedia and compare against 100 Million Wikidata entities - gaps and missing information are presented for human-verification. More: everypolitician.org/about/contri...

When people ask Claude from @anthropic.com for personal advice, conversations are most often about health/wellness and then professional questions about people's careers, followed by asking for relationship advice www.anthropic.com/research/cla...

Climate TRACE is excited to be working with @klimatkollen.bsky.social to support its effort to add corporate emissions data to Wikipedia pages worldwide and increase the transparency and accessibility of critical climate data. Read more: www.mynewsdesk.com/se/klimatbyr...

Demands for Ultimate Beneficial Ownership (UBO) data named as the biggest risk to legal operations in 2026, according to a survey of legal professionals across Europe, the UK, North America and Asia Pacific www.cscglobal.com/service/camp...

An update on the EU's high value datasets from the EU Publications office data.europa.eu/en/news-even... More than 19,000 high-value datasets are now listed and discoverable via data.europa.eu: data.europa.eu/data/dataset... #opendata

OpenCheck is connected to national registries from Estonia, Finland, France, Ireland, Latvia, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the USA so that people can look up companies from those countries using their Legal Entity Identifier opencheck.onrender.com #LEI #CDD #UBO #AML

NEW INVESTIGATION: A leak from inside a financial provider Worldclear shows the firm processed payments for clientele ranging from alleged fraudsters to a Belarusian oligarch and offshore banks.

Ahead of UK illicit finance summit next month, @anticorruption.bsky.social calls for a compact to end anonymous real estate ownership and agree global principles on beneficial ownership disclosure with a focus on data quality and meaningful access to information www.transparency.org/en/publicati...

Sweden's new beneficial ownership API allows approved data users to look up all companies where a person is the beneficial owner as well as finding out any of the beneficial owners linked to a company. API console portal.api.bolagsverket.se/devportal/ap... #beneficialownership #legitimateinterest

I wrote a new piece for @climatetrace.org on ownership data. At @globalenergymon.bsky.social , we’ve found that asset-level #ownership mapping is essential for improving #climate accountability, financial disclosure, and analysis of corporate control structures.

OpenCheck now updated to pull in information from national registries in Ireland, Norway and Finland - as well as Estonia, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the USA. Test it out: opencheck.onrender.com stephenabbottpugh.medium.com/introducing-... #LEI #opendata #GODIN

🧵 1️⃣/5️⃣ Announcing Internet Archive Switzerland: Expanding a Global Mission to Preserve Knowledge 🇨🇭🌍 Visit Internet Archive Switzerland ➡️ internetarchive.ch

President Trump wants the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool painted blue. He used an exemption to steer a $6.9 million contract to somebody he said had worked on his own pools, despite rules about how government money is spent, The New York Times found.

New draft UK regulations have been laid with the aim of making it easier to search for information about trusts that appear listed in the Register of Overseas Entities which is overseen by Companies House www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2026/9...

OpenCheck now updated to pull in shareholding and beneficial ownership details for 327k+ US companies which have an LEI, thanks to public data from the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Test it out: opencheck.onrender.com stephenabbottpugh.medium.com/introducing-... #LEI #opendata #GODIN

Great to see first two MCP servers launched by the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation to help AI assistants fetch and use high-quality, trusted organisational identity data ai.gleif.org/connect-ai #LEI #opendata #GODIN #AI #MCP

Great to hear this @acdatacollective.bsky.social research into insider trading on prediction markets being mentioned by @kevinroose.com and @caseynewton.bsky.social on the Hard Fork podcast from @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/p...

EU fishing firms use foreign flags to tap Indian Ocean tuna, @apnews.com reports. We urge EU states to publish fleet ownership data to enforce laws banning EU profits from illegal fishing, says @vanyalovesfish.bsky.social, our illegal fishing campaign director in Europe: apnews.com/article/tuna...

“Since the Financial Action Task Force updated Recommendations 24 and 25, Austria has become the first (and so far only) FATF member to receive a High rating for beneficial ownership transparency (except Latvia under MONEYVAL)” www.linkedin.com/posts/nazerk... #FATF #beneficialownership

You can now look up 28k Estonian companies which have a Legal Entity Identifier in OpenCheck, thanks to open data on companies, shareholders and beneficial owners from the country's e-Business Register (e-Äriregister). Test it out opencheck.onrender.com stephenabbottpugh.medium.com/introducing-...

Recently, we fixed an unprecedented number of latent security bugs in Firefox identified by Claude Mythos Preview. Here's how we approached this work, what we found, and what we learned: hacks.mozilla.org/2026/05/behi...

FT exclusive: Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr invested in vehicles channelling money into drone manufacturing, crypto and AI companies, underscoring the close ties the family has to businesses that stand to gain from the administration’s policy agenda. ft.trib.al/sfPwsb6