The USA's Securities and Investment Commission has issued proceedings against Sky Group USA LLC, a payday loan company based in Miami, and its CEO, Efrain Betancourt, Jr. alleging fraud in the issue of some USD66 million of promissory notes, primarily within the Venezuelan community in what the SEC calls "affinity fraud" but which we have for several decades referred to as "intra-community fraud."
It is becoming increasingly clear that my earlier argument that, if F1 is serious about providing the closest racing and the best spectacle, it really should abandon the massive shift in car design that is, now, only eight (or less) races away. The new qualifying format creates ample opportunity for the grid to be turned on its head and that helps but, as the race in Zandvoort showed, the fact that the lower budget teams have now had the chance to catch up with the big spenders has brought most of the pack into contention, as McLaren's historic first and second demonstrated in Monza.
It's obvious as one reads around the 'net that while the hardware and software cartels have decided that floppy disks are obsolete, that is not how many users see it. What happens when your backups of old files are on floppies that you've not looked at for 20 years because you haven't needed them in that time?
We're used to weather at the mighty Spa-Francorchamps circuit in the Ardennes forest. Like many racing circuits, it has a micro-climate and, because of its trees, it is usual for moisture to hang around instead of burning off or blowing away.
But the 2021 Belgian Grand Prix was something else entirely.
The situation in Afghanistan is appalling. Exactly how appalling, we cannot know unless we are present. As journalists fly in, report from the tarmac or, in one case, from just outside the airport gates as bullets flew, we get a multitude of one-dimensional pictures that create a collage but not a cohesive whole. Stories of abuse are rife but on the other hand so are stories that the Taliban is far from the version of 20 years ago. All we can say is that the situation is extraordinarily complex, dangerous and it's likely to become far, far worse.
In the middle of all of this, a mail arrives. It's headed "Urgent request from Mohammed."
If like me you often have two or more website admin panels open simultaneously, perhaps even in the same browser window, all using the same theme (most likely "Seven") it's easy to get confused.
There's a very simple trick to help avoid confusion.
It sounds very American but the "Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation" is a part of the UK Treasury, effectively the equivalent of the USA's Office of Foreign Assets Control, OFSI as against OFAC, then. OFSI is gaining increased attention since the UK left the EU, as the UK begins to develop its own financial sanctions regime.
This case is brought under EU-era law. Importantly, it is also against a FinTech company, a sector widely considered under-regulated and lacking in compliance structures.
