Albanian authorities arrested on Thursday former Health Minister Ilir Beqaj, accusing him of misappropriating EU funds through corruption, fraud, income concealment, and abuse of office. If convicted, he faces up to 26 years in prison.
Brazil’s Federal Police detained eight individuals on Tuesday as part of a broader operation against drug traffickers who have used private jets to transport cocaine worth billions of Brazilian reals across the continent, as well as to Europe and Africa.
A U.S. court sent a Canadian trader to prison for 3,5 years and ordered him and his co-conspirator to pay more than US$215 million in restitution for defrauding investors by artificially inflating penny stocks and then selling them at a high prize.
Britain’s National Crime Agency has for the first time asked a court to permanently seize funds held by a Russian oligarch, arguing that they are “proceeds of crime,” because he allegedly moved the money in violation of sanctions regulations.
Russia announced on Wednesday that a French NGO worker arrested last month in Moscow was accused of collecting military information that could compromise the security of the Russian Federation.
The U.S. charged four people in connection with an alleged scheme, which now involves 193 defendants, to defraud federal health care programs of more than US$2.75 billion through the submission of fake opioid prescriptions.
Kazakh tycoon Daniyar Abulgazin has said he and the guests aboard a yacht he chartered in Greece had no role in starting a forest fire on the island of Hydra, adding that authorities questioned them before they flew out of the country.
Spanish and Portuguese authorities arrested 54 suspected members of a network that used a cunning mix of fraudulent phone calls and social engineering to swindle nearly 100 elderly people, depriving them of some 2.5 million euros (US$2.68 million), Europol said on Tuesday.
The Maltese government announced on Tuesday that it would investigate revelations by OCCRP that a U.S. healthcare conglomerate may have financed a smear campaign against the country’s former health minister after disputes over the terms of a hospital renovation contract.
Ukrainian authorities have dismantled a criminal group suspected of producing up to 1,000 forged documents each month in the western Khmelnytskyi region.