The Investigative Journal’s weekly digest of international corruption, money laundering, and asset recovery developments. Every item below is drawn from public records and the linked source documents.
This week’s Global Corruption Watch tracks an arc that runs from Manila to Bern to Kyiv: a former Philippine House speaker arrested in one of the country’s largest plunder cases, a onetime leader of Swiss banking’s own trade association convicted of bribing a Gulf official, and new U.S. Treasury data putting a $12.7 billion figure on the laundering pipelines behind digital-asset scams. Different jurisdictions, same underlying story — the contractors, private banks, shell companies, and underground financial networks that move illicit money, and the enforcement tools now being brought to bear on them.
Philippines: Ex-Speaker Romualdez Arrested in $118 Million Flood-Control Plunder Case
Former Philippine House Speaker Martin Romualdez, a first cousin of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., was arrested Monday after the Sandiganbayan, the country’s anti-graft court, issued warrants in a 7.44-billion-peso (roughly $118 million) plunder case, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). The court’s resolution, posted on the Sandiganbayan’s website, found probable cause against Romualdez and three co-defendants — former lawmaker Zaldy Co, Romualdez aide Joselyn Tragua Serenio, and foreign-exchange company president Felicito Cristobal Guevarra — with no bail recommended.
Prosecutors from the Office of the Ombudsman allege that between 2022 and 2025 the defendants accumulated billions of pesos in commissions, kickbacks, and bribes from contractors seeking government infrastructure work, with flood-control projects at the center of the alleged scheme. Romualdez, still a sitting House member for Leyte’s first district, was served the warrant at a hospital in San Juan City, where officials said he had been admitted after a cardiovascular event and unstable blood pressure. His lawyer, Ade Fajardo, said his client “respect[s] the courts and the legal process” and seeks only the same due process afforded other Filipinos. The charges are allegations; nothing has been proven at trial.
The significance is hard to overstate. The case places one of the most powerful figures in Philippine politics — a member of the president’s own family — at the center of a widening investigation into infrastructure spending. The presidential palace said it respected the Ombudsman’s decision and that those responsible should be held accountable “regardless of whether they are relatives, allies or political opponents” of the president. Whether the flood-control probe now reaches the broader network of contractors and officials that records suggest profited from these projects will be the real test of that commitment.
Switzerland: Former Swiss Bankers Association Chief Convicted of Foreign Bribery
Switzerland’s Federal Criminal Court on Tuesday handed Pierre Mirabaud, a former president of the Swiss Bankers Association and former partner at the Geneva private bank Mirabaud & Cie, a two-year suspended sentence for foreign bribery and money laundering, OCCRP reported. According to the indictment, the 78-year-old “continuously and systematically” funneled nearly 300 payments totaling 82.3 million Swiss francs (about $101.7 million) between 2000 and 2012 to Fahad Al-Rajaan, the longtime director general of Kuwait’s Public Institution for Social Security. In exchange, filings indicate, Al-Rajaan steered $595.2 million in institutional funds to the bank.
Mirabaud pleaded guilty and told the court he was there “to take responsibility”; his attorney said he had cooperated with authorities since the investigation opened in 2012. Al-Rajaan, convicted in absentia in Kuwait in 2015 on corruption and embezzlement charges, died in London in 2022. A guilty verdict against the man who chaired Swiss banking’s own trade body from 2003 to 2009 is a landmark in the slow reckoning over Swiss private banking’s role in servicing corrupt officials — and further evidence that prosecutors are increasingly targeting the enablers of kleptocracy, not just the officials themselves.
United States: FinCEN Puts $12.7 Billion Figure on Scam-Center Money Laundering
The U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) on September 3 published a financial trend analysis and alert identifying nearly $13 billion in suspicious activity tied to digital-asset investment scams run by overseas scam centers, largely operated by transnational criminal organizations based in Southeast Asia. FinCEN analyzed 33,904 Bank Secrecy Act reports filed between September 2023 and December 2025, totaling approximately $12.7 billion in suspected scam-linked flows, with targets in all 50 states.
The analysis describes an industrialized laundering apparatus: “guarantee marketplaces” where scam operators purchase phishing, account-creation, and laundering services; professional money launderers who establish shell companies and mule networks; and stablecoin transfers that move proceeds to digital-asset exchanges outside the United States. “Digital asset investment scams pose one of the most significant fraud threats facing Americans today,” said Gene Lange, who is performing the duties of Treasury’s Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. The accompanying alert gives financial institutions red-flag indicators for detecting scam-center activity.
Separately, FinCEN on September 8 issued an alert on Iranian procurement efforts targeting the commercial aviation industry — another signal of Treasury’s focus on the financial infrastructure behind sanctioned-state supply chains.
Ukraine: Laundering Allegations Reach the Presidential Office — No Charges Filed
Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s Presidential Office since January, has responded for the first time to wiretap recordings that court documents obtained by Ukrainian outlet hromadske appear to place in a conversation about an alleged $3.3 million scheme to launder bail money for former energy minister Herman Halushchenko. It is important to state plainly: authorities have not publicly named Budanov, he has not been charged, and no court has made findings against him. “Let the court figure out who appears where,” he told hromadske.
The recordings surfaced in Ukraine’s sprawling “Midas” investigation into energy-sector bribery and embezzlement, which investigators allege was masterminded by businessman Timur Mindich. Filings indicate prosecutors allege that Budanov’s then-deputy, Iryna Mudra, was tasked with legitimizing the bail funds, and that wiretaps captured discussion of routing money through state-owned Sense Bank. President Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed Mudra in August after anti-corruption authorities formally named her a suspect; the High Anti-Corruption Court ordered her held on August 25. Mudra denies wrongdoing and says the recordings were released out of context. For the Western governments funding Ukraine’s defense, the question is whether the country’s anti-corruption institutions — which built the Midas case — will be allowed to follow the evidence wherever it leads, including inside the presidential administration.
Ecuador: Fifteen People, Five Companies Convicted in $398 Million Laundering Case
An Ecuadorian court convicted 15 people and five companies of laundering nearly $398 million linked to international drug trafficking, the country’s Prosecutor General’s Office announced and OCCRP reported. Fourteen defendants, including alleged ringleader Roberto Carlos Álvarez Vera, known as “El Gerente,” received 13-year sentences; a fifteenth received 10 years. The court ordered the five companies dissolved and their assets confiscated.
Prosecutors said the network used shell companies and commercial fronts between 2015 and 2025 to push drug money through Ecuador’s financial system via cash and check deposits, international wire transfers, bank loans, and purchases of real estate, vehicles, and livestock. The corporate dissolutions are the notable feature: courts stripping laundering vehicles of legal existence — not merely fining them — is the kind of structural remedy anti-money-laundering advocates have long urged in cocaine-transit economies.
Spain: ‘Dubai Bank’ Underground Narco-Finance Network Dismantled
Spanish police arrested 21 people and dismantled what investigators describe as an underground financial network — dubbed the “Dubai Bank” — used to fund global drug shipments, OCCRP reported. The international probe, which records indicate began with the intentional sinking of a cocaine-laden ship in 2021, also took down a Europol high-value target.
The case underscores a pattern documented across recent European narco-finance investigations: cartel-scale trafficking increasingly settles its accounts through informal, hawala-style parallel banking structures rather than licensed institutions, with Gulf financial hubs recurring as reference points. Dismantling the money network, rather than only seizing drugs, is where European enforcement is now concentrating — because the financial layer is the part traffickers cannot quickly rebuild.
Also on the Radar
Australia’s financial intelligence agency AUSTRAC opened an investigation into Western Union Financial Services Australia and its U.S.-based parent over how they manage money laundering and terrorism-financing risks, including whether their monitoring systems can identify known laundering typologies, per OCCRP. And for systemic context on why financial intelligence units succeed or fail against exactly the flows described above, Transparency International’s recent analysis, “Financial intelligence units: Powerful tools against corruption if governments let them work,” pairs usefully with its Corruption Perceptions Index 2025 findings, which documented worsening perceived corruption globally.
Leads That Warrant Deeper TIJ Investigation
Philippine flood-control contractors. The Sandiganbayan docket (Case E-SB-26-CRM-0074) and Ombudsman filings should identify the contractor entities that allegedly paid kickbacks. Mapping their beneficial owners, joint-venture partners, and any offshore links is the natural next layer — and one Philippine outlets have only begun to touch.
Sense Bank and Ukraine’s state banking channels. The Midas case filings indicate alleged designs on a state-owned bank’s financial flows. Which correspondent relationships and payment corridors would have been exposed, and what did bank supervisors see? High Anti-Corruption Court filings are the paper trail to watch.
The U.S. rails beneath scam-center laundering. FinCEN’s 33,904 BSA reports imply specific U.S. institutions repeatedly touched by mule accounts, shell companies, and stablecoin off-ramps. Identifying which exchange corridors and which categories of institution appear most often in the FTA’s typologies is a data story waiting to be built from the public analysis.
Dubai as the recurring settlement hub. A Spanish narco-bank nicknamed for the emirate, and OCCRP’s separate reporting that a Hungarian media tycoon’s firm formed a Dubai subsidiary while under investigation at home, both point at the same jurisdictional gap. A structured look at UAE corporate registries against ongoing European cases is overdue.
Editorial note: This digest is compiled from public records, court documents, and the reporting linked above. Individuals facing charges are presumed innocent unless and until convicted; where subjects or their representatives have responded publicly, those responses are noted. Corrections: editor@tij.news.