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    Justice Dept. Charges Russian Oligarch With Violating Sanctions

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    WASHINGTON — The Justice Department said on Wednesday that it had charged a Russian oligarch with violating U.S. sanctions and unveiled additional measures intended to counter Russian money laundering and disrupt online criminal networks in an effort to enforce financial penalties on Moscow.The moves came as the United States has ratcheted up pressure on the Kremlin and some of the wealthiest Russians in light of growing evidence of atrocities in Ukraine and as Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said the United States was helping its European partners investigate potential war crimes.The oligarch, Konstantin Malofeev, 47, is widely considered one of Russia’s most influential business moguls — he is said to have deep ties to President Vladimir V. Putin — and is among the more prominent conservatives in the country’s Kremlin-allied elite. (The indictment renders his surname as Malofeyev.)The actions demonstrated the reach of a task force created last month to find and seize the assets of wealthy Russians who violate U.S. sanctions on Russia, and the penalties appeared meant to enforce the far-reaching economic sanctions that the United States has imposed along with European allies.“The Justice Department will use every available tool to find you, disrupt your plots and hold you accountable,” Mr. Garland said, adding that officials had moved “to prosecute criminal Russian activity.” He pointed to the seizure this week of a $90 million yacht owned by Viktor F. Vekselberg, who was previously targeted with sanctions over Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.Mr. Garland said law enforcement was also pursuing Mr. Malofeev for illegally transferring money in violation of sanctions.The criminal charges against Mr. Malofeev, which were unsealed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, follow an indictment filed there in March against a former Fox News employee, John Hanick. Mr. Hanick, an American citizen, is accused of working for the oligarch from 2013 to 2017, and was arrested in February in London.Justice Department officials said in a statement on Wednesday that the charges against Mr. Malofeev were in connection with his hiring of Mr. Hanick “to work for him in operating television networks in Russia and Greece and attempting to acquire a television network in Bulgaria.”The U.S. Treasury Department, in imposing sanctions on Mr. Malofeev in December 2014, called him “one of the main sources of financing for Russians promoting separatism in Crimea.”Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement on Wednesday that the sanctions barred Mr. Malofeev from paying or receiving services from American citizens, or from conducting transactions with his property in the United States.Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 4U.N. meeting. More

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    United Auto Workers reformers prevail in vote to choose president by direct election.

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    Members of the United Automobile Workers union have voted decisively to change the way they choose their president and other top leaders, opting to select them through a direct vote rather than a vote of delegates to a convention, as the union has done for decades.The votes on the election reform proposal were cast in a referendum open to the union’s roughly one million current workers and retirees and due by Monday morning. About 143,000 members cast ballots, and with 84 percent of the vote counted on Wednesday night, a direct-election approach was favored by 63 percent, according to a court-appointed independent monitor of the union.The referendum was required by a consent decree approved this year between the union and the Justice Department, which had spent years prosecuting a series of corruption scandals involving the embezzlement of union funds by top officials and illegal payoffs to union officials from the company then known as Fiat Chrysler.More than 15 people were convicted as a result of the investigations, including two recent U.A.W. presidents.Reformers within the U.A.W. have long backed the one member, one vote approach, arguing that it would lead to greater accountability, reducing corruption and forcing leaders to negotiate stronger contracts. A group called Unite All Workers for Democracy helped organize fellow members to support the change in the referendum.“The membership of our great union has made clear that they want to change the direction of the U.A.W. and return to our glory days of fighting for our members,” said Chris Budnick, a U.A.W. member at a Ford Motor plant in Louisville, Ky., who serves as recording secretary for the reform group, in a statement Wednesday evening. “I am so proud of the U.A.W. membership and their willingness to step up and vote for change.”David Witwer, an expert on union corruption at Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg, said the experience of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which shifted from voting through convention delegates to direct election in 1991, after an anti-racketeering lawsuit by federal prosecutors, supported the reformers’ claims.Dr. Witwer said the delegate system allowed seemingly corrupt union leaders to stay in power because of the leverage they had over convention delegates, who were typically local union officials whom top leaders could reward or punish.“Shifting the national union election process from convention delegates to membership direct voting was pivotal in changing the Teamsters,” he said by email.At the U.A.W., leadership positions have been dominated for decades by members of the so-called Administration Caucus, a kind of political party within the union whose power the delegate system enabled.Some longtime U.A.W. officials credit the caucus with helping to elevate women and Black people to leadership positions earlier than the union’s membership would have directly elected them.But the caucus could be deeply insular. The Justice Department contended in court filings that Gary Jones, a former U.A.W. president who was sentenced to prison this year for embezzling union funds, used some of the money to “curry favor” with his predecessor, Dennis Williams, while serving on the union’s board.Union officials have said Mr. Williams, who was recently sentenced to prison as well, later backed Mr. Jones to succeed him, helping to ensure Mr. Jones’s ascent. More

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    Justice Dept. Suit Says Facebook Discriminates Against U.S. Workers

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    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJustice Dept. Suit Says Facebook Discriminates Against U.S. WorkersThe complaint, which targets the company’s hiring of immigrants on temporary visas, opens a new front in Washington’s battle against Big Tech.Outside the headquarters of Facebook, which the Justice Department accused of favoring immigrants over Americans when hiring.Credit…Jason Henry for The New York TimesBy More