Corruption Ledger

Two Dubai entities and several individuals were charged in an indictment unsealed in the District of Maryland recently for their roles in a multimillion-dollar scheme to export non-organic grain into the United States to be sold as certified organic. Hakan Agro DMCC and Hakan Organics DMCC, both based in Dubai, and Goksal Beyaz, Nuray Beyaz and Mustafa Cakiroglu, all of…

President Joe Biden said Thursday the U.S. would immediately begin turning away Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans who cross the border from Mexico illegally, his boldest move yet to confront the arrivals of migrants that have spiraled since he took office two years ago. The new rules expand on an existing effort to stop Venezuelans attempting to enter the U.S., which…

The former Bolivian Minister of Government was sentenced today to 70 months in prison for conspiracy to launder bribes he received in exchange for corruptly helping a U.S. company win a lucrative contract from the Bolivian government. Arturo Carlos Murillo Prijic, 58, of Bolivia, pleaded guilty on Oct. 20, 2022, to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. According to court…

Pennsylvania-based medical device distributor Jet Medical Inc. (Jet) agreed to pay $200,000 to resolve criminal allegations relating to a migraine headache treatment, and Jet and two related companies agreed to pay another $545,000 in a civil settlement involving the same device. In a criminal information filed today in the Southern District of Illinois, the government alleged that between April 2014…

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty in Manhattan federal court Tuesday to charges that he cheated investors and looted customer deposits on his cryptocurrency trading platform as a judge set a tentative trial date for October. Bankman-Fried, 30, denied charges accusing him of illegally diverting massive sums of customer money from FTX to make lavish real estate purchases, donate…

The House Jan 6 committee is shutting down, having completed a whirlwind 18-month investigation of the 2021 Capitol insurrection and sent its work to the Justice Department along with a recommendation for prosecuting former President Donald Trump. The committee’s time officially ends Tuesday when the new Republican-led House is sworn in. With many of the committee’s staff already departed, remaining…

  U.S. Department of Justice FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Tuesday, December 20, 2022 A federal grand jury in the District of Maryland returned an indictment that was unsealed today charging two men for their roles in schemes to defraud investors in CytoDyn Inc., a publicly traded biotechnology company (OTCQB: CYDY) based in Vancouver, Washington. According to court documents, Nader Pourhassan, 59,…

Bladimir Moreno, 55, was sentenced for leading a federal racketeering and forced labor conspiracy that victimized Mexican H-2A agricultural workers in the United States between 2015 and 2017. U.S. District Court Judge Charlene Edward Honeywell of the Middle District of Florida sentenced Moreno to 118 months in prison with three years of supervised release and ordered him to pay over…

Ukrainian oligarch Konstantin Zhevago, accused of embezzlement and money laundering, was arrested at an elite French ski resort. Zhevago was arrested by French law enforcement at the request of the Ukrainian State Bureau of Investigation, the agency said Wednesday in a statement. French and Ukrainian law enforcement had been cooperating on the case for months before the oligarch’s arrest. The…

A Manhattan federal judge known for swift decisions and a no-nonsense demeanor during three decades of overseeing numerous high-profile cases was assigned Tuesday to Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency case. The case was relegated to Judge Lewis A. Kaplan after the judge originally assigned recused herself because her husband worked for a law firm that had done work related to Bankman-Fried’s collapsed…

The anti-corruption unit of Peru’s attorney general’s office on Monday detained six generals amid an investigation into allegations the government of ousted former President Pedro Castillo illegally promoted police and military officers. Police also seized “documents and devices” during a raid of the home of Castillo’s former Defense Minister Walter Ayala, the anti-corruption unit said. Castillo, who was arrested earlier…

South Korea’s military fired warning shots, scrambled fighter jets and flew surveillance assets across the heavily fortified border with North Korea on Monday, after North Korean drones violated its airspace for the first time in five years in a fresh escalation of tensions. South Korea’s military detected five drones from North Korea crossing the border, and one traveled as far as…

A former Tokyo Olympics official arrested on bribery charges was granted bail on Monday. The Tokyo District court set bail for Haruyuki Takahashi at 80 million yen, NHK reported. Prosecutors have raided multiple companies in recent months in a widening corruption scandal related to the Tokyo Games. Takahashi, a former member of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics board and before that…

KPMG India settled a proceeding before the US Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) on 6 December 2022; but there is barely any coverage by the Indian media. PCAOB, which audits public companies, censured KPMG Assurance and Consulting Services LLP (KPMG India) and the engagement partner (EP) Sagar P Lakhani for quality control failures, supervisory failures and documentation failures while…

An internal investigation by parent company ByteDance confirms that employees obtained personal data from reporters who were probing Beijing’s influence on the app’s activities ByteDance, the Chinese technology giant that owns TikTok, admitted Thursday that several employees of the social network spied on journalists from Forbes magazine who were investigating the link between the company’s US branch and China. The…