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Greetings From Amsterdam,
OCCRP is back from the holidays with our first newsletter of 2024. We’re recapping investigations from the end of 2023, which exposed signs of corruption from Latin America to Central Asia.
If you’re new to OCCRP — welcome. Also, know that you can reply directly to these newsletters with questions about our reporting or emails.
Now, the latest in the fight against corruption:
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🇮🇶 Allegations of Security Red Flags and Missing Paychecks at Baghdad’s Airport
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Several employees at Baghdad International Airport, including security personnel, say they stopped receiving regular paychecks last May and doubt whether the airport is safe under its new security contractor. Company records, a leaked spreadsheet of salaries, and interviews with other employees corroborated these claims.
The workers, who come from around the world, were hired and sent to Baghdad by the Canadian firm Biznis Intel, which took over security duties from the British firm G4S, one of the world’s largest security companies, in October 2022.
👮♂️ Security Concerns: OCCRP spoke with employees who raised a number of security concerns, including that Biznis Intel doesn’t have enough dogs to sniff explosives, and that those it has are old and sick. Baghdad International handles about 2 million passengers a year.
❓ What is Biznis Intel? The Ontario-registered firm is run by CEO Hafeez Oki, an Afghan-Canadian businessman whose previous work included selling bedding to hotels and running an orthotics NGO making prosthetic limbs in Kandahar in the 1990s. Other websites list Biznis as a tour operator or an electronics company.
>> Read the full story
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🇹🇲 State-Built Beauty Clinic Sold at Massive Discount to Company Tied to Dictator’s Family
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In October 2020, the Turkmen government unveiled a $51 million state-of-the-art beauty clinic, replete with fitness courses, hair stylists, and other cosmetic-related services. But just before the opening, the lavish mall was secretly privatized and sold at a huge discount to a company connected to the president’s family.
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👑 Turkmenistan’s Long-Time Leader Looms Large: Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, an eccentric dictator known for his love of horses and brutal style of rule, officially handed the presidency to his son Serdar last year. But his influence is still felt across the country under his bespoke title of “National Leader.”
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🧮 Calculating the Discount: Based on Turkmenistan’s official inflated exchange rate, the sale price set by then-president Berdimuhamedov was about $44.5 million – a loss to the state of $6.5 million. ($51m - $44.5m).
However, the real discount may be much higher, thanks to Turkmenistan’s widely used unofficial exchange rate, which was 23.6 manats per dollar at the time of the sale. At that rate, the center would have sold for just $6.6 million — nearly 90 percent less than its building cost.
🌐 The Big Picture: Turkmenistan is often referred to as a “hermit kingdom” due the intense isolation the ruling Berdimuhamedov family enforces on its citizens and economy. A heightened form of kleptocracy has taken root in several major industries, including food imports, petrochemicals, and mobile operators.
🤔 Our Data and Sources: This investigation is primarily based on a leaked membership database of the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs of Turkmenistan as well as corporate records that revealed the beneficiaries of the beauty clinic sale.
>> Read the full story
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🇬🇹 Central American Development Bank's Role in Guatemala’s Odebrecht Scandal
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An investigation by prosecutors — including testimony from a former Guatemalan minister at the center of several corruption scandals — indicates a loan from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI) may have been a key part of a bribery scheme run by the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht.
The former minister has since claimed that his testimony had been fabricated. But Guatemala’s anti-impunity authorities — and three sources close to the Odebrecht case — confirmed that the former minister did in fact give the testimony.
🌐 The Big Picture: This is not the first time CABEI has been accused of enabling corruption. Our network in Latin America uncovered cases in which the development bank funded projects that led to environmental destruction, and others where its funds were diverted for corrupt practices or used to fund the pet projects of dictators.
>> Read the full story
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🇰🇿 Central Asian Cotton Powers Russia’s Sanctioned Gunpowder Plants 🇺🇿
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Despite taking a neutral stance on Russia’s war in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan significantly increased imports of cotton pulp, a key ingredient in gunpowder, to Russia after its full-scale invasion in February 2022, trade data shows.
In most cases, the cotton pulp was first bought by Russian importers who went on to sell the product to Russian military factories that make gunpowder. But we also found some Uzbek firms that sent direct shipments to Russian plants under Western sanctions.
🌐 The Big Picture: Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have promised Washington and Brussels that they will help curb sanctions evasion. But our investigations, including this one from May, show that the two former Soviet republics have helped supply the Kremlin’s war machine.
>> Read the full story
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🇸🇬 A Singaporean Businessman Goes Missing
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Su Binghai, the founder of an Asian private equity firm, has disappeared from his Singapore home and workplace as police seek to question him in connection to an alleged $2 billion money laundering ring busted in August.
🌐 The Big Picture: Singapore has burnished a reputation for having a clean government and business environment despite lax regulations. This image, however, was tarnished in August after a series of police raids on an alleged money laundering ring sent shockwaves through the country’s political elite. One person who may be involved in the scandal, we reveal, is now MIA.
>> Read the full story
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Join the fight against corruption.
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✍️ From the Gaza Strip: OCCRP Editor Rana Sabbagh speaks with journalists reporting from Gaza who are struggling to find fresh water, food, a place to sleep, a toilet, electricity points to charge their laptops and phones, and even the most basic form of transport. Over 77 media personnel, the vast majority Palestinian, have been killed since the war with Israel erupted on October 7.
>> Read the full story
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OUR KOREAN COLLEAGUES TARGETED
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🇰🇷 Newstapa: South Korean authorities raided the homes of the CEO of our media partner Newstapa and two of its journalists in early December. Officials say the raids are part of a defamation case that was launched over a 2022 Newstapa story involving the country’s president. The outlet’s CEO condemned the raids and rejected the allegations as “baseless”.
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🇨🇾 Cyprus: The U.S. government sent a delegation of financial crime experts to Cyprus in December 2023 to help with its probe into the suspected Russian sanctions violations that were revealed in the Cyprus Confidential project.
OCCRP was one of the media partners in Cyprus Confidential, a collaborative investigative project led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
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🇱🇹 Lithuania: Four Lithuanian government agencies — including the central bank and the interior ministry — issued a joint statement calling for stronger regulations on cryptocurrencies. The Baltic state has become a hub of digital assets after neighboring Estonia imposed stricter rules in 2022 on crypto trading licenses, which scared away the tech-friendly country’s then-sizable crypto community.
🇺🇸 United States: The Corporate Transparency Act passed in 2021 has finally come into effect. The law requires both new and existing companies operating in the U.S. to disclose their “ultimate beneficial owners” to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).
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Not familiar with UBO? Ultimate Beneficial Ownership information is critical in the fight against corruption as it brings transparency to who benefits from anonymous shell companies. OCCRP advocates for every jurisdiction to make UBO information publicly accessible, which the U.S. law does not require. >> Read more
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🇧🇩 Bangladeshi Nobel Laureate Sentenced: A court in Bangladesh sentenced Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, a pioneer in microcredit to help impoverished people, to six months in prison for corruption, labor law violations, and failure to create a welfare fund for his employees. Yunus has denied all charges and has 30 days to appeal.
🇵🇰 The Return of Sharif: A Pakistani court has overturned former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's last remaining corruption conviction, clearing another obstacle for him to run in February elections, where he could secure a fourth non-consecutive term.
🇺🇳 UN Corruption Summit: The United Nations Convention against Corruption organized its 10th conference in Atlanta last month to discuss the fight against graft. Several attendees advocated for legislation that limits money laundering in global financial systems, like the "Enablers Act" in the U.S.
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⚽ Sports Corruption: Illegal gambling on sports is worth up to $1.7 trillion annually, according to a UN report. As the world’s most popular sport, and a magnet for huge sums of money, football is particularly prone to corruption.
🌱 A New Opium King: Myanmar has become the world's number one producer of opium, a title previously held by Afghanistan for decades until the Taliban enforced a strict ban on the crop last year. Most of the opium in Myanmar is grown in northern Shan State, which borders China, Laos, and Thailand. Known as the “Golden Triangle,” the region has been a hub for drug cultivation and smuggling since the late 1940s.
🟠 Mass Copper Theft: South African companies lose billions of dollars every year to copper thieves, who strip the valuable electrical conductor from critical infrastructure around the country, according to a report from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC).
💊 A Non-American Fentanyl Bust: Malaysian authorities seized over 800 kilograms of fentanyl destined for Dubai, where it could’ve sold for roughly $9.4 million. This is one of the first major busts of the synthetic opioid outside of North America.
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P.S. Thank you for reading the OCCRP newsletter. Feel free to reply with any feedback.
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