UPDATE ON MIAMI BILLION DOLLAR VENEZUELA MONEY LAUNDERING CASE REMINDS US THAT THE U.S. POINTEDLY IGNORES THE FACT THAT MALTA REMANS A CENTER FOR MONEY LAUNDERING

A minor note in the financial crime news, that one of the dozen accused money launderers in the massive, billion dollar venezuelan money laundering case in Federal Court in the Southern District of Florida has had his case dismissed, after five years, reminds us of two things:

(1) The defendants are are either already convicted, or remain fugitives from American justice in Venezuela.

(2) The Republic of Malta remains a black hole for international money laundering, which the United States Department of  Justice has ignored, even when the is a nexus with American money laundering cases. One might think that there is an unofficial "hands-off" policy in Washington, given that even when there are Maltese links to American prosecutions, laundrymen there don't show up as co-defendants here.

Most legal observers, including this writer, believed that, once the present Democratic administration took office in 2021, that the overt and systemic money laundering in Malta would result in American money laundering prosecutions where such activities intersected our financial structure, specially specific cases pending in the Southern District of New York, but targeting Malta's money laundering operations failed to occur, even in such high-profile international cases as Iranian-owned Pilatus Bank, which had an American director, and a case in which Americans were involved in a major hospital acquisition scandal.

To date, with the exception of barring two former senior officials in the Maltese Labour Party from entering the United States, nothing of substance has emerged from American law enforcement agencies or the DOJ about the systemic money laundering regime and offshore center that exists in Malta. it remains a mystery why the present American administration seems afraid to take a bite out of Maltese organized crime, and its domestic political allies in power.

As the present government in Malta, which is merely a continuation of the corrupt previous one, in which the former prime minister only resigned after the then-prime minister was linked to the EU's only political assassination of an investigative journalist in recent memory, is allowed to continue to ignore international money laundering, and the United States for some reason, fails to act decisively against the country's money laundering banks and laundrymen, nothing will change. 

It is doubtful that even the eventual exposure of the terrorist financing cyber-network there that has been funding Hamas will result in a change in American policy towards Malta since even the insulting treatment given to the pugnacious Secretary of Defense visiting during the Trump Administration about military privileges failed to wake up America about Malta as the problem child of the EU. Don't expect to see any indictments about Maltese laundrymen at SDNY, as they continue to practice their dark profession with impunity, notwithstanding when it impacts the United States' financial structure.