A trove of 715,000 leaked emails, charts, contracts, and audits details how the daughter of the former Angolese president Isabel dos Santos, reportedly Africa’s richest woman, managed to amass and shield her US$2 billion fortune with the help of western consulting and accounting firms. 

When officers entered on Sunday morning one of the prison blocks in Pedro Juan Caballero, Paraguay, they found it completely empty apart from one inmate trying to disappear through a tunnel that was dug from one of the cells to the outside of the prison walls.

The US financial regulatory agency suspended an accountant on Wednesday following a year-long prison sentence he received for having illicitly acquired confidential information about when and how KPMG, the accounting firm he worked for, would be inspected in order improve results. 

KPMG Headquarters Photo Credit: Line Ørstavik (CC BY 2.0)The US Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC, barred David Middendorf from practicing accounting in the three states he previously was certified in -- Georgia, New York, and Ohio. 

 Middendorf served as a former national managing partner for audit quality at the “Big Four” accounting firm, KPMG, at the time the firm fared poorly in inspections conducted by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, PCAOB, a nonprofit corporation overseen by the SEC that inspects the audit work performed by registered accounting firms.

 Under the leadership of Middendorf, several employees worked to improve the firm’s performance by recruiting and hiring former PCAOB employees and obtaining information on which KPMG audits would be inspected, according to the Department of Justice. 

Jeffery Wada, an inspection leader at the PCAOB provided Cynthia Holder, a former PCAOB employee who was hired by KPMG, with confidential information about future audits on the company’s findings. 

 “I have the grocery list… All the things you’ll need for the year,” Wada texted Holder, in reference to the entire 2017 final confidential  inspection selections. Holder shared this information to Brian Sweet, another former PCAOB employee who had joined KPMG, who then passed the information on to Middendorf. 

 Authorities arrested the group in 2018 and charged them with conspiracy and wire fraud.

 A US$50 million fine was also issued to KPMG by the SEC last summer for altering past audit work. The firm was also ordered to hire an independent consultant “to review and assess the firm’s ethics and integrity controls and its compliance with various undertakings,” a press release by the agency stated. 

“The breadth and seriousness of the misconduct at issue here is, frankly, astonishing,” Steven Peikin, Co-Director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division, said in the same press release. “This settlement reflects the need to severely punish this sort of wrongdoing while putting in place measures designed to prevent its recurrence.”

The former head of one of China’s banks admitted in a state TV documentary that he took millions of dollars in bribes and kept stashing some of them in a Beijing apartment “just like making regular trips to the supermarket,” Bloomberg reported last week.

The Philippine Justice Department said on Thursday it will charge the former chief police enforcer of the country’s war on drugs with corruption for allegedly protecting officers linked to the narcotics trade, the Agence France Presse reported.

One of the largest American investment banks, Goldman Sachs, reported a 24.8 percent drop in fourth quarter profits on Wednesday, which is likely connected to its involvement in the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) scandal.

“President Trump knew exactly what was going on,” an associate of President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudi Giuliani said in an interview to MSNBC on Wednesday, referring to alleged efforts to force Ukraine into announcing a graft investigation into Trump’s political rival.

The Estonian Prosecutor's Office confirmed on Thursday it expanded the investigation into money laundering through Danske bank’s Estonian branch from two to more than 10 cases that are involving suspicious transactions worth US$ 2 billion.

Peruvian authorities detained 124 people suspected of being members of an organized crime group involved in prostitution and drug trafficking, the Ministry of Interior announced on Monday.

The Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission, ZACC, said on Wednesday that an Anglican  bishop was arrested for pocketing a US$700,000 loan he and his accomplices had taken out in 2016 to construct a school.