Croatia’s anti-corruption police (USKOK) arrested the mayor of the capital city, Zagreb, and several of the city’s top administrative officials on Oct. 19 on suspicion of corruption and abuse of power relating to the city’s municipal services company, reports Deutsche Welle.
When Sondra Arquiett agreed to cooperate with government investigators investigating drug traffickers, she gave them access to her cell phone and all its contents. But could she have anticipated what they would do with it?
A court in Astana, Kazakhstan, on Oct. 13 sentenced Muslim Umiryayev, the country’s former vice minister of agriculture, to 10 years in prison for accepting a US$ 100,000 bribe.
By Nathan Goldman
The criminal libel trial of Khadija Ismayilov, an investigative journalist and OCCRP partner, is ongoing in Baku, Azerbaijan. A travel ban preventing her from leaving the country remains in effect.
The case is a private prosecution brought by Elman Hasanov, who claims that Ismayilova published two defamatory documents about him on her Facebook page earlier this year.
Hasanov alleges that one document said that Azerbaijan’s Ministry of National Security (MNS) used a sex tape to blackmail him into becoming a paid informant for them, and the other was a report that claimed he had raped a woman in 1992 and used connections to have the charges dropped, after which the victim committed suicide.
The founder of Liberty Reserve, a digital currency payment processing company that prosecutors say criminals used to launder US$6 billion of illicit profits, has pleaded not guilty in the US District Court in Manhattan, according to ABC News.
A former top executive of Zurich-based UBS AG, a Swiss financial services company, faces up to five years in prison for conspiracy to commit tax fraud if convicted in a trial that began Oct. 14 in Florida.
A pair of Italian tennis players face corruption accusations after intercepted Internet and phone conversations indicate they fixed tennis matches, reports Associated Press.
Ukraine’s parliament has approved several highly-anticipated anti-corruption policies in their final session before October elections.
A federal judge sentenced the former mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina to nearly four years in prison on Oct. 14 for taking bribes since 2009, reports Reuters.
Three Florida men were charged with conspiring to pay and receive kickbacks and money laundering relating to a 2012 case against Jose Carlos Morales. According to the FBI, the men provided Morales with Medicare beneficiary information, which he then used to submit more than US$ 23 million in fraudulent claims.