Greetings From Amsterdam,
Earlier this year, Kyrgyz authorities arrested 11 of our colleagues at Temirov Live after the outlet reported on the family of a security official. Since then, the OCCRP network has focused on completing Temirov Live’s investigative work.
We finished and published one of these stories on Tuesday, which leads this edition of OCCRP Weekly:
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UNCENSORED: THE KYRGYZSTAN PROJECT 🇰🇬
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All the President’s Men: State Projects Handed to Apparent Proxies in Kyrgyzstan
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Kyrgyzstan’s President Sadyr Japarov has drastically decreased transparency into public spending, even as he has launched a succession of ambitious state projects intended to show off his government’s power.
These projects, we reveal, are being implemented by companies owned by people who appear to be close to the president himself, or one of his key appointees.
🤔 Our Data & Sources: This investigation is primarily based on Kyrgyz company and land records, social media posts (especially from TikTok and Instagram), and a source with inside knowledge of the Presidential Administrative Directorate, a powerful government body that has spearheaded the state projects we investigated.
🌐 The Big Picture: Kyrgyzstan’s reputation as the most democratic country in Central Asia has faded under Japarov, who took office in 2020 after a revolution toppled the previous government. A key aspect of his push to centralize power has involved silencing independent media.
>> Read the full story
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🦸 Hidden Heroes: A number of other journalists from Kyrgyzstan contributed reporting for this story, but cannot be named due to the ongoing climate of repression in the country.
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Mysterious Wealth: Tajikistan PM’s Wife Bought Luxury Dubai Properties 🇹🇯
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The wife of Tajikistan’s prime minister has no known income, and her husband is barred from commercial activities. Yet Ikhbolkhon Nazirova owns several properties in her home country, and she purchased real estate in Dubai worth about $1.4 million.
This unexplained wealth stands in stark contrast to the living conditions in most of Tajikistan, which is considered the poorest country in Central Asia.
>> Read the full story
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💎 Tajik Journalism, a Rare Find: There is almost no free media in Tajikistan, where the president has spent the last three decades muzzling critics and concentrating power. Our media partner Azda TV, which helped us obtain the property records that made this story possible, reports from exile.
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Polish Businessman Makes Millions From Firm That Deals With Putin’s Russia 🇵🇱
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AMT Group, one of Russia’s largest IT systems integration companies, has recently done business with several companies linked to the Kremlin war machine and Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
As a Russian company, AMT Group is free to work with sanctioned entities. However, its founder, Andre Mankowski, is not. As a citizen of both France and Poland, doing business with Putin’s sanctioned regime could carry legal consequences. That may be why Mankowski’s name disappeared from the AMT Group website, where he was previously listed as president, after Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
💡 The Revelation: Mankowski has received 50 payments amounting to the equivalent of $3 million from AMT Group and a related Russia-based company called AMT Group Telecom in the past two years, according to financial documents seen by our member center IStories.
>> Read the full story
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The Mankowski Pedigree: While he descends from Polish aristocracy, Andre once eked out a living serving crepes on the streets of Paris before making a name for himself in computers, according to family lore.
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Join the Fight Against Corruption.
Support Investigative Journalism.
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Serbian Ruling Party’s Mystery Mega-Spend On Pre-Election Promo Material 🇷🇸
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The Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) regularly uses a variety of memorabilia – caps, pens, lighters – to promote its political messaging.
But ahead of the 2022 election, the party’s spending on swag appears to have been higher than usual, according to leaked customs data shared with OCCRP’s local member center, the Center for Investigative Journalism of Serbia (CINS).
The records show SNS importing a huge haul of China-made items at the cost of $3.3 million – from a Romanian company that primarily makes content for television.
Because the cargo was delivered just before elections were announced, SNS was not required to declare the materials as an electoral expense in its campaign reports, shielding the purchase from deeper scrutiny.
Experts said the findings raise questions over what was delivered, who was paid, and the true purpose of the transaction.
>> Read the full story
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Fishing Boats and Cargo Ships: How Colombian Cocaine Travels the World 🇨🇴
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Official statistics on busts of drug shipments originating in Colombia — the world’s largest cocaine producer by far — are scattershot and hard to find. A leak of prosecutor’s office documents helped reporters fill in some gaps.
>> Read the full story
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🚨 OCCRP NETWORK UNDER ATTACK 🚨
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Serbian Colleagues Targeted Again: A judge and her husband have filed two legal actions against our Serbian member center KRIK, which the outlet decried as an alarming attempt to silence reporting about the judiciary.
Aside from seeking monetary compensation, Dušanka Đorđević, a judge of the Appellate Court in Belgrade, is demanding that our Serbian colleagues Stevan Dojčinović and Bojana Pavlović face 10-month prison sentences and two-year bans from journalism for allegedly violating her and her husband’s privacy rights.
The lawsuits are over an award-winning data journalism project KRIK published about members of Serbia's judiciary, including details about the court cases they have adjudicated and properties they own.
Our Serbian member center is already facing 16 other so-called SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against public participation), which refer to suits filed specifically to threaten, intimidate, and financially burden journalists.
“Adopting lawsuits such as these ones against KRIK would be a verdict against journalism and it would send a signal to all journalists not to dare to write about judges,” says KRIK Editor Stevan Dojčinović. “We are particularly concerned by the fact that the lawsuits were filed by a judge whose job should be to recognize and stop SLAPP lawsuits, not to initiate them against journalists and seek their imprisonment."
You can support KRIK by making a donation here.
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A Saudi Food Poisoning Case Expands: Anti-corruption authorities in Saudi Arabia have reportedly joined an investigation into contaminated mayonnaise used by a popular burger chain that killed one person and hospitalized at least 75 others. Al-Arabiya reports that multiple food inspectors involved in the case are suspected of prioritizing “personal gain over public health and safety.”
Corrupt and Complacent: Russian lawmakers with suspected hidden wealth tend to vote less and serve for shorter periods of time in the State Duma, the name of the country’s parliament, according to a study published in the American Political Science Review. The study’s author determined which parliamentarians might have undisclosed wealth by cross-referencing the annual financial declarations of 1,034 parliamentary deputies with independent datasets on luxury car ownership and usage.
Malta’s Muscat Pleads Not Guilty: Joseph Muscat, a former MEP who was Malta’s prime minister from 2013 to 2020 pleaded not guilty this week to criminal charges related to the privatization of three state-run hospitals.
Muscat’s alleged connection to several corruption scandals earned him the dubious honor of being OCCRP’s Corrupt Person of the Year in 2019.
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American Political Campaigns Say ‘Yes’ to Crypto: Donald Trump’s presidential campaign announced it will accept contributions in the form of cryptocurrencies.
The U.S. government allows for crypto political donations as long as the value of the digital asset falls below the legal contribution limits at the time it was given. Some experts are concerned that these kinds of donations expose American elections to more bribery and foreign influence. There are some cryptocurrencies designed to make it difficult for people to trace the origins of the funds.
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Using OCCRP Aleph to Navigate a Minefield: The Dark Web is filled with information organized crime and corruption, if you know where to look. A new report from Humber College’s StoryLab showcases how OCCRP's proprietary tool, Aleph, enables safe and effective navigation of data dumps on darknet spaces.
The report, 'Using OCCRP’s Aleph for Dark Web Data Analysis', was made possible through a collaboration between Humber College and the Toronto Star.
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P.S. Thank you for reading the OCCRP newsletter. Feel free to reply with any feedback.
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