Labour says Rishi Sunak should be “honest” with the public by publishing documents which appear to show he had doubts about the Rwanda scheme to stop small boats from crossing the Channel.
Documents seen by Sky News suggest the prime minister was sceptical about government plans to send illegal migrants to the African country.
Mr Sunak expressed his doubts while he was chancellor in March 2022, shortly before the Rwanda scheme was first announced by Boris Johnson’s government.
The existence of the Number 10 briefing papers was widely reported on Saturday.
Now the Labour Party is urging Mr Sunak to “come clean”.
Watch Wilfred Frost’s live interview with Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer on the Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips show on Sky News from 8.30am on Sunday.
The papers revealed this weekend suggest the now prime minister had particular concerns about the costs of the scheme.
It has since been made public that the government has committed at least £400m to the Rwandan government, despite not a single person being removed to Rwanda.
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The papers also appear to show Mr Sunak doubted the effectiveness of his now flagship policy, saying the then chancellor believed the “deterrent won’t work”.
A government source said Mr Sunak has put the Rwanda policy at the heart of his plan for government, and as chancellor, funded the scheme.
The government’s Rwanda Bill will return to the House of Commons this month.
Image: Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper
Yvette Cooper, Labour’s shadow home secretary, said: “The more we hear about the government’s Rwanda scheme, the more obvious it becomes that this is an extortionate con that won’t fix the Tory chaos in our immigration system.
“The home secretary, the former immigration minister and now the prime minister clearly don’t believe the government’s plans will work.
“It’s time the Tory government was honest with the public, and publish both the papers outlining Rishi Sunak’s concerns and the full details of the cost of the scheme.
“In a few weeks’ time, the prime minister will ask his divided and sceptical backbench MPs to vote for a Rwanda scheme he clearly doesn’t believe in and which he refuses to set out the costs for.
“They should stop wasting time on this costly charade and adopt Labour’s plan to go after the criminal smuggling gangs, negotiating new security arrangements with Europe to better protect our borders and set up a new returns unit to ensure those with no right to be in the UK are swiftly removed.”
After the reports about Mr Sunak’s doubts on Saturday, a government source said: “As chancellor, Rishi funded the Rwanda scheme and put it at the heart of his 10-point plan the month after becoming PM.
“Now he is passing the Rwanda Bill following the Supreme Court judgment to get flights off the ground.
“He is the first prime minister ever to oversee a reduction in small boat crossings, which were down by 36% last year.”
The new trade tariffs announced by US President Donald Trump may place added pressure on the Bitcoin mining ecosystem both domestically and globally, according to one industry executive.
While the US is home to Bitcoin (BTC) mining manufacturing firms such as Auradine, it’s still “not possible to make the whole supply chain, including materials, US-based,” Kristian Csepcsar, chief marketing officer at BTC mining tech provider Braiins, told Cointelegraph.
On April 2, Trump announced sweeping tariffs, imposing a 10% tariff on all countries that export to the US and introducing “reciprocal” levies targeting America’s key trading partners.
Community members have debated the potential effects of the tariffs on Bitcoin, with some saying their impact has been overstated, while others see them as a significant threat.
Tariffs compound existing mining challenges
Csepcsar said the mining industry is already experiencing tough times, pointing to key indicators like the BTC hashprice.
Hashprice — a measure of a miner’s daily revenue per unit of hash power spent to mine BTC blocks — has been on the decline since 2022 and dropped to all-time lows of $50 for the first time in 2024.
According to data from Bitbo, the BTC hashprice was still hovering around all-time low levels of $53 on March 30.
Bitcoin hashprice since late 2013. Source: Bitbo
“Hashprice is the key metric miners follow to understand their bottom line. It is how many dollars one terahash makes a day. A key profitability metric, and it is at all-time lows, ever,” Csepcsar said.
He added that mining equipment tariffs were already increasing under the Biden administration in 2024, and cited comments from Summer Meng, general manager at Chinese crypto mining supplier Bitmars.
“But they keep getting stricter under Trump,” Csepcsar added, referring to companies such as the China-based Bitmain — the world’s largest ASIC manufacturer — which is subject to the new tariffs.
Trump’s latest measures include a 34% additional tariff on top of an existing 20% levy for Chinese mining imports. In response, China reportedly imposed its own retaliatory tariffs on April 4.
BTC mining firms to “lose in the short term”
Csepcsar also noted that cutting-edge chips for crypto mining are currently massively produced in countries like Taiwan and South Korea, which were hit by new 32% and 25% tariffs, respectively.
“It will take a decade for the US to catch up with cutting-edge chip manufacturing. So again, companies, including American ones, lose in the short term,” he said.
Csepcsar also observed that some countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States region, including Russia and Kazakhstan, have been beefing up mining efforts and could potentially overtake the US in hashrate dominance.
“If we continue to see trade war, these regions with low tariffs and more favorable mining conditions can see a major boom,” Csepcsar warned.
As the newly announced tariffs potentially hurt Bitcoin mining both globally and in the US, it may become more difficult for Trump to keep his promise of making the US the global mining leader.
Trump’s stance on crypto has shifted multiple times over the years. As his administration embraces a more pro-crypto agenda, it remains to be seen how the latest economic policies will impact his long-term strategy for digital assets.
Cryptocurrency exchange OKX is under renewed regulatory scrutiny in Europe after Maltese authorities issued a major fine for violations of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws.
Malta’s Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit (FIAU) fined Okcoin Europe — OKX’s Europe-based subsidiary — 1.1 million euros ($1.2 million) after detecting multiple AML failures on the platform in the past, the authority announced on April 3.
While admitting that OKX has significantly improved its AML policies in the past 18 months, the authority “could not ignore” its past compliance failures from 2023, “some of which were deemed to be serious and systematic,” the FIAU notice said.
The news of the $1.2 million penalty in Malta came after Bloomberg in March reported that European Union regulators were probing OKX for laundering $100 million in funds from the Bybit hack.
Bybit CEO Ben Zhou previously claimed that OKX’s Web3 proxy allowed hackers to launder about $100 million, or 40,233 Ether (ETH), from the $1.5 billion hack that occurred in February.
This is a developing story, and further information will be added as it becomes available.
Authorities in the US state of Massachusetts continue targeting unlawful cryptocurrency market practices, with a local court fining crypto financial services firm CLS Global.
A federal court in Boston on April 2 sentenced CLS Global on criminal charges related to fraudulent manipulation of crypto trading volume, according to an announcement from the Massachusetts US Attorney’s Office.
In addition to a $428,059 fine, the court prohibited CLS Global from offering services in the US for a probation period of three years.
CLS Global, a crypto market maker registered in the United Arab Emirates, in January pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit market manipulation and one count of wire fraud.
CLS agreed to manipulate the FBI’s “trap token” NexFundAI
The charges against CLS Global followed an undercover law enforcement operation involving NexFundAI, a token created by the FBI as part of a sting operation in May 2024.
CLS Global was among at least three firms that took the FBI’s bait and agreed to provide “market maker services” for NexFundAI, including a fraudulent scheme to attract investors to purchase the token.
In October 2024, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced fraud charges against CLS and its employee, Andrey Zhorzhes. The US securities regulator also filed complaints against two other NexFundAI manipulators, Hong Kong-linked ZM Quant Investment and Russia-linked Gotbit Consulting.
CLS Global’s profile
According to CLS Global CEO Filipp Veselov, the company was founded in 2017 to fill in a “huge gap in the market for high-quality market-making solutions and trading consulting.”
Prior to CLS, Veselov worked at the Russian cryptocurrency exchange platform Latoken, which is advertised as a “global digital asset exchange” and has about 370,000 followers on X.
The CLS team also includes chief revenue officer Pavel Singaevskii, who previously served as sales manager at Stex, a crypto platform that reportedly ceased operations without warning in 2023.
According to CLS Global’s X page, the platform continues operating and has more than 110,000 followers at the time of publication.
How much wash trading is in crypto?
Wash trading is an illegal practice involving artificially inflating trading volume by repeatedly buying and selling the same asset, generating a misleading perception of demand.
According to a January 2025 report by the US blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, the crypto market has at least $2.6 billion in estimated wash traded volumes, or just about 2% of total daily crypto trading volumes, as reported by CoinGecko.
Estimated wash trade volume in crypto. Source: Chainalysis