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REPORTING IN UKRAINE
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🇺🇦 How Two Ukrainian Teenagers Endured Russian Captivity — Two girls from Kherson, Nastia and Masha, were forced to live in Russian institutions and pressured to abandon their national identities — until journalists helped them escape.
[link removed]
Made by Slidstvo.Info (YouTube)
OCCRP’s Ukrainian member center Slidstvo.Info documented their harrowing journey out of Russian captivity. >> Read the full story ([link removed])
Join the fight against corruption.
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** THE OCCRP NETWORK
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🇷🇺 IStories: Our Russian member center speaks with a military expert about Ukrainian civilians who have been captured ([link removed]) since Russia invaded.
🇭🇺 Atlatszo: Our Hungarian member center reports on Octopus Invest, a company with ties to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s family, which was recently liquidated after multiple scandals ([link removed]) involving public funds.
🇧🇷 piauí: Our Brazilian partner reportson a delegation of agribusiness leaders ([link removed]) who recently visited China, including representatives from companies that owe millions of dollars in environmental degradation fines.
🇷🇴 Context: Our Romanian member center reports on a study ([link removed]) that examines European politicians who have been spreading pro-Kremlin conspiracy theories and disinformation.
** OCCRP:UNREPORTED
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⚖️ Weaponizing Copyright and Privacy Laws — Frivolous defamation cases aren’t the only tools that powerful people use to silence investigative journalism. Reporters around the world, including those at OCCRP and in its network, are being hit with bogus accusations of copyright infringement aimed at getting hard-hitting stories taken down or de-indexed by search engines like Google.
In this blog post, we explain how we fought back against an onslaught of spurious copyright claims.
>> Read the full blog post ([link removed])
** OCCRP HAS IMPACT
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🇨🇭 Switzerland: A Zurich court convicted four bankers for failing to conduct necessary due diligence over Swiss bank accounts opened in the name of Sergei Roldugin, a close friend of Vladimir Putin.
Financial ties between Putin and Roldugin were uncovered in the Panama Papers, a collaborative investigation led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which included OCCRP. ([link removed])
🇸🇾 Syria: U.S. and U.K. authorities imposed sanctions ([link removed]) on relatives of Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad and several others who are allegedly involved in the captagon drug trade. One of them was exposed in an award-winning OCCRP investigation ([link removed]) .
** PRESS FREEDOM NEWS
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🇷🇺 Russia: Russia’s State Security Service (FSB) detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich ([link removed]) on espionage charges, part of the Kremlin's increasing clampdown on independent media.
** MORE CORRUPTION NEWS
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🇵🇹 Golden Visas in Portugal: Last month, Portugal scrapped its controversial “golden visa” program, which allows wealthy foreigners to buy residency, to curb a spike in housing prices.
But the autonomous archipelago region of Madeira has refused to go along with the directive ([link removed]) from Lisbon, citing the economic benefits that come with the quick injection of foreign capital.
Anti-corruption advocates ([link removed]) have criticized golden visa schemes for allowing kleptocrats to hide their money in the West. Read more OCCRP reporting on these programs here ([link removed]) .
🇨🇳 High-Profile Bribery Allegations in China: United States authorities charged Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the cryptocurrency platform FTX, with bribing Chinese officials with $40 million worth of cryptocurrency ([link removed]) to unfreeze his bank accounts.
The U.S. charges were made under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which criminalizes U.S. citizens and entities in engaging in bribery with foreign officials.
** MORE ORGANIZED CRIME NEWS
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🇳🇬 Organ Harvesting Plot: A Nigerian senator, his wife, and a doctor were convicted in the U.K ([link removed]) . for conspiring to remove a man's kidney, which was to be donated to the couple’s daughter.
🇪🇺 Tainted Honey: Half of the honey sold in the EU could be secretly adulterated ([link removed]) with sweeteners and water to increase its volume. Most of the suspicious shipments allegedly come from China.
🇺🇸 Money Laundering Loopholes: Russian oligarchs have been able tolaunder their vast wealth in the United States despite sanctions ([link removed]) by exploiting lax financial laws, experts say.
P.S. Thank you for reading the OCCRP newsletter. Feel free to reply with any feedback.
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