Combined with the ongoing normalisation of regional instability and violence, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought on new opportunities for criminal expansion in the Levant, where illicit activity could become a “permanent and pervasive fixture,” experts say.
German lawmaker and member of the ruling Christian Democratic Union, Karin Strenz, died on Saturday while traveling privately from Cuba to Germany. Strenz was implicated in the Azerbaijani Laundromat, a EU-wide lobbying and money laundering scheme revealed by OCCRP in 2017.
During his traditional public Angelus prayer address on Sunday, Pope Francis spoke out against organized crime and its use of the COVID-19 pandemic to enrich itself.
A new wave of violence has spread across Mexico as the country approaches legislative elections in June, with criminal gangs murdering, extorting and threatening candidates as a way to strengthen their political influence.
A global media watchdog urged Pakistani authorities to investigate last week's murder of a local journalist in the southern Sindh province and arrest the killers.
Mexico’s president has proposed a bill that would make graft cases involving public servants and human rights violations public. The move is supposed to make corruption investigations more transparent but experts said they will believe it when they see it.
Prosecutors in Malta charged on Saturday former top government official Keith Schembri, his father and nine business associates with money laundering and fraud. Schembri was accused years ago by murdered journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia of corruption.
Myanmar’s dictatorial military junta arrested on Friday two more reporters in its latest attempt to crack down on the country’s free press and limit the flow of information about resistance to last month’s coup.
A Bucharest court sentenced on Friday six members of the so-called Riviera-Maya Gang to prison terms between three and 10 years for setting up a large-scale skimming operation in Mexico.