July 11, 2025

Hello John,

This week we reveal the Soviet origins of a Trump adviser who has been skirting questions about his birthplace, plus take you on a trip inside a Paraguayan forest where narco-traffickers are building secret airstrips. 

Read on for the latest in global crime and corruption. 

OCCRP Exclusive

Republican and Trump administration insider Sergio Gor has long been cagey about his origin story.

But OCCRP and Times of Malta put an end to the mystery this week after finding a notarized property record that revealed his birthplace: Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, which was then part of the Soviet Union.

His lawyer confirmed the detail, which was listed in the 2021 deed for a house Gor bought from his late mother’s company in the Maltese port city of Cospicua.

Gor, who has been dubbed “maybe the most powerful man you’ve never heard of” by the Washington Post, was raised in Malta and attended Catholic school there before emigrating to the United States.

He became a citizen and later rose through the ranks of Republican politics, working for Senator Rand Paul, co-founding a publishing house with Donald Trump Jr., and taking up a role in January as Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office. 

Speculation over his backstory grew last month after he declined to reveal his country of birth to the New York Post, other than to say it was not Russia.

Read the full story → 

Eyes On Paraguay

Last year, OCCRP reporter Aldo Benitez traveled through the remote region to find one of these hidden airstrips.

Read his story here.

In 2022, 39-year-old Humberto Coronel was shot dead in the city of Pedro Juan Caballero, becoming the 18th journalist killed in Paraguay in 30 years.

This week, Forbidden Stories, OCCRP, and other media partners launched the Paraguay Alliance project to pick up where Coronel and others left off. 

The investigations seek to continue the work of silenced journalists and expose networks of organized crime and corruption operating in Paraguay.

On Tuesday, the group released three new stories. Read more about them here.

Find out more →

More OCCRP Reporting

An investigation by OCCRP member center Africa Uncensored has laid bare inconsistencies and falsehoods in police’s official account of the death in custody of the Kenyan activist and blogger Albert Ojwang.

Ojwang died in police custody last month after he was arrested for allegedly posting defamatory content online. An autopsy later revealed injuries consistent with physical assault, contradicting police claims that he died after hitting his head in a jail cell.

Using open-source digital forensics, Africa Uncensored has also found  no evidence linking Ojwang to the social media post  authorities cited to justify his arrest.  

Kenyan President William Ruto condemned the killing and police misconduct. A formal investigation is ongoing.

Read the full story →

Belarusian Fertilizer Company Dodging EU Sanctions 

State-owned Belarusian fertilizer company Grodno Azot has continued exporting to the EU despite sanctions imposed by the bloc in 2021, an investigation by OCCRP partner Belarusian Investigative Center  has found.

Fertilizer linked to the company has entered Europe with falsified documents, often routed through Latvia and falsely labeled as being manufactured by other Belarusian companies.

A leaked government document reveals the Belarusian regime’s role in setting up the scheme of “special exporters” to disguise Grodno Azot’s role and “overcome sanctions.”

In 2024, Grodno Azot’s exports to the EU were worth $59 million.

Read the full story →   

News Briefs

• A 62-year-old man is facing charges over a spiritual “blessing scam” in Australia, which targeted elderly women of Chinese background and convinced them to hand over cash and valuables in order to lift curses.

• Experts warn that a provision in the United States’ “Big Beautiful Bill”, which imposes a 1 percent tax on money sent abroad by immigrants, is likely to drive business for informal money transfer channels — many of which are linked to organized crime.

• Europol announced the arrest of 28 suspected members of a cocaine trafficking network tied to the Italian mafia known as the ʼNdrangheta. 

• U.S. President Donald Trump announced plans to impose a 50 percent tariff on Brazilian imports, and denounced the trial of his ally, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, as a “witch hunt.”

• Bangladesh’s former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was indicted in absentia by a Dhaka court on charges of crimes against humanity over the deaths of protesters in the 2024 crackdown. She remains in exile in India. 

• Ukrainian men fleeing conscription are being detained in Moldova’s breakaway Transnistria region and interrogated by individuals believed to be from or linked to Russia’s Federal Security Service.

• An apparent purge continues in Russia as top officials face a wave of accusations of corruption, arrests, and unexplained deaths.

• The U.S. has sanctioned a Russian national and two of his companies for helping North Korean IT workers operate abroad using false identities.

OCCRP News

The CNN Worldwide documentary “NarcoFiles: Tren de Aragua” won an Emmy in the Outstanding Investigative News Coverage in Spanish category.

The film was produced by CNN with support from OCCRP’s Latin America team as part of Narcofiles: The New Criminal Order— a global collaborative investigative project into modern-day organized crime and those who fight it. 

Watch the documentary →

This week our Serbian member center KRIK marked its 10-year anniversary with party hats and cake — but the celebration took place outside a Belgrade courtroom where its journalists are facing a lawsuit brought by a judge they investigated. 

The judge is demanding prison sentences of 10 months each for editor-in-chief Stevan Dojčinović and reporter Bojana Pavlović, plus a two-year ban on practicing journalism.

Over the past decade, KRIK has relentlessly investigated Serbia’s political elites. Yet while these figures rarely see the inside of a courtroom, KRIK’s reporters have been bombarded with lawsuits intended to silence their work.

It’s a turbulent time for press freedom in Serbia — but KRIK won’t stop reporting. They do need your support, though.

Please donate and help KRIK keep exposing corruption in Serbia.