A federal court in Texas has blocked a website selling fake coronavirus vaccine kits in the first US judicial action against pandemic-related fraud, according to a statement from the Justice Department.

The head of Indonesia’s Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), Firli Bahuri, said the country could start sentencing people to death if they are convicted of corruption during the COVID-19 pandemic, Jakarta Post reported on Sunday.

Several prominent politicians sold off significant portions of their stocks prior to the market crash attributed to the coronavirus outbreak. Many now face public scrutiny, and some have called for their resignation. 

As millions in the United States experience economic despair in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, recent reports show that the pharmaceutical industry, banking executives on Wall Street, and politicians are exploring ways to profit.

Swedbank carried out almost 37 billion euros (US$40 billion) of transactions with a high risk of money laundering over five years, according to an internal investigation published on Monday that found the bank’s Baltic businesses actively chased risky customers.

Although authorities in Skopje announced that citizens of North Macedonia being repatriated from Romania and Bulgaria will have to be quarantined for two weeks in special facilities, only a group of Roma ended up in army barracks while everybody else was allowed to go home.

After testing positive for COVID-19, Bulgarian oligarch and shipping magnate Kiril Domuschiev, 50, checked on Wednesday into a private hospital in the capital Sofia, violating the rules of the national coronavirus task force and endangering 350 hospital patients and staff.

Bosnians were shocked this week when they heard that a politically connected local tycoon may have pulled strings to skip the prescribed safety protocols during hospital admission,  bringing the coronavirus to the worst possible place - the Department for Pulmonary disease.

Without the usual bidding process, Russian authorities awarded a US$190.000 contract to Yevgeny Prigozhin, a restaurant and catering businessman close to the Kremlin, to provide food for Moscow’s COVID-19 hospital patients, the Moscow Times reported on Thursday.

The head of America’s national whistleblowing watchdog has called for a dedicated task force to fight coronavirus-related fraud and corruption among government contractors.