Myanmar’s lucrative timber trade continues to be mired in criminality and corruption, including systematic tax evasion worth millions of dollars by companies exporting teak wood to European markets, according to a report published Wednesday.

A 30ft narco-submarine, four and a half tons of expired butter, seafood of fishy origin, and the drug-trafficking ring operating out of children’s daycare centres ― the week in oddities, from us here at OCCRP’s Daily News team.

Police in five countries arrested 52 suspected members of a creative organized criminal group which hid cocaine in terrarium bedding material, hashish and marijuana inside hydromassage bathtubs and even built its own submarine.

Moscow’s lawsuits against five social media giants for not removing calls to join government-banned rallies from their platforms are part of a new wave of censorship in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, experts said on Wednesday.

A court in Russia sentenced banker Oleg Kuzmin on Monday to nine years in prison and ordered him to pay a one-million-ruble (US$13.574) fine for his part in a major money-laundering operation known as the “Russian Laundromat” or the “Moldovan Scheme,” Kommersant reported. 

The United States expanded on Wednesday export restrictions on Russia as part of existing sanctions over the poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny who has recently been transferred to a notorious Russian jail.

The United States’ $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus bill that President Joe Biden signed last week, has become the first coronavirus package to address cybersecurity as part of a national recovery plan.

Three non-governmental organizations announced on Monday that they have helped a Syrian man sue in Moscow members of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner for war crimes, accusing them of cruelly killing his brother in Syria.

Rahn+Bodmer Co., the oldest private bank in Zurich, has agreed to pay US$22 million to settle criminal charges in the United States that it helped U.S. clients hide millions of dollars they kept on offshore accounts, enabling them this way to evade paying taxes, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement.

Leading Europe as the nation with the most captive tigers and representing one of the continent’s top illegal tiger trafficking hotspots, France is home to a booming tiger trade, according to an article published Friday.