Migrants rights groups denounced on Friday the decision of a Greek court to sentence a Somali asylum seeker to 146 years in prison for people smuggling because he steered the boat in which he and other illegal migrants tried to cross from Turkey to Greece.

Authorities in Europe have dismantled several investment fraud schemes across the continent and recovered some of the money victims lost. Confiscation of proceeds from crimes is a strategic priority of the European Union, Europol said.

The U.S. Navy said it intercepted in the North Arabian Sea a so-called stateless dhow — a single or double masted sailing ship, bearing no flag to signify it’s nation of origin or registry — but carrying illicit weapons and ammunition enough to supply a not insignificant military force. 

Prisons in North Macedonia are filled with corrupt staff, inmates are persistently being  mistreated and authorities have failed to improve longstanding structural deficiencies within the country’s prison system, a Council of Europe report found.

Civil society organizations in the Philippines accused President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration of using COVID-19 to eliminate political opponents by arresting them on trumped up charges and then letting them die of COVID-19 in prison.

Authorities seized in 2020 nearly 60,000 illegally trafficked cultural artifacts at European border checkpoints, arrested 67 suspects and opened more than 300 investigations in the fifth edition of Operation Pandora that was launched in 2016.  

An Argentinian attorney has turned to the Austrian government and the European Central Bank (ECB) for information that would explain why Austria’s defunct Meinl Bank has bought off the debt of the bankrupt Argentinian postal service against its own and the interest of other creditors but in favor of the family of Argentine former President Mauricio Macri.

U.K. law enforcement agencies arrested eight people suspected of acting as cash couriers responsible for laundering more than 50 million British pounds (US$70,29 million) in criminal profits, the National Crime Agency (NCA) reported Tuesday.

Human rights and free media advocates called on Uzbekistan to release anti-corruption blogger Otabek Sattoriy, calling his conviction for extortion and defamation wrongful and an attack against freedom of speech.

Trafficking in exotic cats, plant poachers, tiny songbirds hidden in hair rollers, the police chief caught ditching meetings and the man who sold his bank account to Romanian scammers — welcome to your semi-regular roundup of the weirdest events in corruption and organized crime, from OCCRP’s Daily News team.