The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has initiated dozens of investigations that extend import restrictions well beyond China. Meanwhile, three regulatory regimes tighten simultaneously.

Free trade zones facilitate illicit networks that have moved money laundering from identities to infrastructure. We unpack three ways that money laundering is now more challenging to detect due to network architecture designed to evade screens.

The EGC–EVelution–Trafigura MOU sets out the first credible US–DRC cobalt corridor outside Chinese-controlled refining. The facility it depends on opens in 2029 at the earliest, and every tonne consumed before then still travels through China.

The Balkan cartel had exclusive loading rights in the president’s containers. Standard screening saw a banana company.

When forced labor investigations become public record, the tools that missed what investigators found become a liability, not a defense.

Oil prices spiked $30 a barrel the day the bombs fell. For Gazprom, Rosneft, and Lukoil, a windfall followed. For the regulators trying to stop Russian war revenue faced a familiar problem: the money is moving, and they can’t see where.

Iranian strikes on Qatar’s gas terminals have knocked out a third of global helium supply. The scramble for alternatives is opening a sanctions exposure that big data-driven screening tools were never designed to detect.

OFAC sanctioned the Rwanda Defence Force and the Hong Kong traders moving conflict tantalum out of eastern DRC. The mineral passed through both of them on its way to Ulba Metallurgical Plant, a Kazakh state asset, the only tantalum processor in the former Soviet satellite state, and a fixture in the certified supply chains of major Western manufacturers.

Two regulatory forces are moving in opposite directions. Beijing is restricting how supply chain data can be collected. Brussels is raising the evidentiary standard for what that data must prove. Enterprise screening platforms are caught in the middle.