Breaking News

In one of her first official acts, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has scrapped the Justice Department’s Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, a federal effort to find, seize and repatriate the proceeds of foreign corruption, ACAMS moneylaundering.com has confirmed.

“Task Force KleptoCapture, the … Kleptocracy Team and the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative shall be disbanded,” Bondi told employees Wednesday. “Attorneys assigned to those initiatives shall return to their prior posts, and resources … devoted to those efforts shall be committed to the total elimination of cartels and TCOs [transnational criminal organizations].”

The Justice Department launched the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative in July 2010, under the direction of then-Attorney General Eric Holder. Task Force KleptoCapture launched in March 2022, weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine commenced.

News of the decision first appeared in Whale Hunting, an online weekly newsletter published by Project Brazen.