Global Corruption Watch is The Investigative Journal’s weekly digest of international kleptocracy, money laundering, sanctions and anti-corruption enforcement. All matters described below rest on public records and published reporting; where cases are unproven, we note that they remain allegations.
The week’s international corruption file was defined less by a single scandal than by a pattern: the machinery that moves illicit money is proving faster and more adaptive than the authorities chasing it. Undercover reporting exposed a Russian shadow-payment industry that openly advertises sanctions evasion; investigators traced a former African first family’s hidden Gulf property empire; and the U.S. Treasury moved against war-financing and conflict-gold networks stretching from Khartoum to Kigali. Below are the developments accountability reporters should be tracking.
1. Russia’s shadow-payment ecosystem advertises itself — and a state-backed stablecoin scales up
An undercover investigation published June 17 by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) with partners SourceMaterial and Delfi found that a “cottage industry” of payment brokers is openly marketing sanctions-evasion services on Telegram. Posing as Russian businessmen, reporters contacted more than eight providers; in at least five cases the agents agreed to route money to European suppliers while concealing its Russian origin, offering to invoice through intermediaries in Hong Kong, Dubai, Indonesia, Canada and Germany. “There will be no trace of the Russian company, and the payment will be successful,” one broker wrote, according to the reporting.
Records examined by reporters link several proposed intermediaries to the TGR network, whose alleged principals — Ukrainian national George Rossi and Russian national Elena Chirkinyan — were sanctioned by the United States in December 2024 and named in the U.K. National Crime Agency’s “Operation Destabilise,” which exposed a billion-dollar laundering system serving Russian elites. The intermediaries approached by reporters denied involvement in any evasion scheme.
The most consequential thread is A7A5, a ruble-pegged stablecoin launched last year by a company tied to Russian-Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor — already under U.K. and EU sanctions — and the Russian state-owned Promsvyazbank. Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis calculated that A7A5 has moved roughly $93.3 billion in ten months, a figure the U.K. Foreign Office says is equivalent to about half of Russia’s annual military spending. The full OCCRP investigation is available here. The takeaway for investigators: sanctions enforcement is now a contest against purpose-built financial infrastructure, not merely individual evaders.
2. A late Gabonese president’s son and a Dubai property portfolio
As part of the OpenLux project’s continuing analysis of Luxembourg’s corporate register and Dubai land records, OCCRP reported June 24 that Fabrice Albert Andjoua Ondimba Bongo — a son of Gabon’s late president Omar Bongo — acquired a sprawling real-estate portfolio in Dubai while he held senior public office. Reporters found he bought roughly 43 luxury apartments worth about $15 million between 2020 and 2023, a period during which, records indicate, he served as director general of Gabon’s state budget department.
The disclosures are difficult to square with an official salary. A 2015 Gabonese decree cited in the reporting sets pay for top civil servants at barely $1,900 a month. Reporters also identified a French real-estate holding company connected to Andjoua and his mother, former Constitutional Court president Marie-Madeleine Mborantsuo, and documented a rare supercar valued at about $400,000 shipped from Belgium while he was in office. The findings — which concern a politically exposed person and the beneficial ownership of offshore assets — have not been tested in court; the full account is published by OCCRP.
The case is a textbook illustration of Dubai’s continuing role as a haven for politically exposed wealth, a pattern earlier documented in OCCRP’s “Dubai Unlocked” project. It also underscores why beneficial-ownership transparency in Luxembourg and the Gulf remains a live front in the fight against kleptocracy.
3. Treasury sanctions a cross-border network “fueling Sudan’s civil war”
On June 26 the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated a set of companies and individuals it said were sustaining the combatants in Sudan’s catastrophic civil war. In an action styled “Treasury Sanctions Networks Fueling Sudan’s Civil War and Worsening Humanitarian Crisis,” OFAC named the Sudanese state-owned Ports Engineering Company Ltd, the Khartoum-based Target Multiactivities Company Ltd, and — notably — India’s SBL Energy Limited, an explosives manufacturer, alongside individuals in Sudan and India.
The designation notice also lists a procurement layer registered in Panama, Talent Bridge S.A., with three Panama-based principals. The structure — an explosives supplier in India, a state enterprise in Port Sudan, and a corporate front in Central America — shows how a conflict economy is knit together across three continents, and how ostensibly ordinary trade and shipping firms become the connective tissue of war financing. Designations block any U.S.-based assets and generally bar Americans from dealing with those named.
4. Conflict-gold designations reach into Rwanda
A day earlier, on June 25, OFAC added several Rwanda-based mining companies and two individuals to its sanctions list under its Democratic Republic of the Congo program. Among the entities is Gasabo Gold Refinery Ltd, which Treasury linked to the M23 armed group that has driven much of the violence in eastern Congo; the individuals named, Jean Malic Kalima Karekezi and Bosco Kayobotsi, are tied to a cluster of mining and refining firms.
The action targets one of the most durable illicit-finance problems on the African continent: the laundering of Congolese conflict minerals — gold above all — through neighboring states before they enter licit supply chains. For investigators, the designations offer a fresh map of corporate names, registration numbers and beneficial owners worth cross-referencing against refiners and traders further downstream.
5. FATF adds Iraq and Bosnia to its “grey list,” removes Algeria and Namibia
The Financial Action Task Force closed its Paris plenary on June 19 — the last under Mexico’s presidency, with the United Kingdom assuming the chair on July 1 — by placing Iraq and Bosnia and Herzegovina under increased monitoring, bringing the “grey list” to 22 jurisdictions. Algeria and Namibia were removed after on-site reviews confirmed they had completed their action plans. The blacklist of jurisdictions subject to a call for action was unchanged, comprising North Korea, Iran and Myanmar, per the FATF’s June statement and the U.S. Treasury’s readout.
Notably, Bosnia’s agreed action plan foregrounds the timely availability of accurate beneficial-ownership information and stronger supervision of lawyers, accountants and other “gatekeeper” professions — the same enablers that recur throughout this week’s cases. Grey-listing is not a criminal finding, but it raises compliance costs and correspondent-banking friction, and it is one of the few levers that reliably prompts legislative change.
6. A wanted online-betting magnate’s European expansion draws scrutiny
OCCRP reported July 7 that a string of criminal investigations and an Interpol Red Notice have trailed Turkish online-betting magnate Fedlan Kılıçaslan — associated with the MeritKing brand — as he built out operations across Europe. According to the reporting, a Poland-registered company promoted gambling sites without the required license, and Polish authorities are examining him and related entities in a money-laundering inquiry; Turkish authorities have sought his arrest and ordered asset seizures on money-laundering suspicions. OCCRP’s account is here, with related coverage from Türkiye Today.
Separately, Spanish authorities arrested Kılıçaslan in Barcelona in March on unrelated sexual-assault charges and confiscated his passport; those charges are pending and he has not been convicted. The broader significance lies in the sector: lightly regulated online gambling, layered across multiple EU jurisdictions, remains an efficient vehicle for moving and obscuring value, and a persistent blind spot for European financial supervisors.
7. The foreign-bribery enforcement landscape keeps shifting
The transatlantic bribery-enforcement picture remains in flux. In the United States, the Justice Department paused Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement in early 2025 under an executive order and later issued revised guidelines prioritizing cases tied to cartels and transnational criminal organizations and to U.S. competitiveness. Even so, resolutions have continued: in late 2025 a Guatemalan telecom, Comunicaciones Celulares S.A. (Tigo Guatemala), agreed to pay more than $118 million to resolve an FCPA matter involving alleged monthly cash payments to legislators, and law-firm trackers report at least one further corporate resolution and an indictment, as summarized in year-in-review analyses.
In the United Kingdom, the Serious Fraud Office has signaled a more assertive posture. Its director used a June 3 address to the Global Anti-Corruption, Ethics and Compliance conference in New York to highlight revised corporate-cooperation guidance and a recent deferred-prosecution agreement with Ultra Electronics, according to the published remarks. For multinationals, the practical message is that a lighter U.S. touch on the FCPA does not translate into a global amnesty; exposure has partly migrated across the Atlantic.
Leads worth watching
The correspondent-banking underworld. OCCRP’s “Worldclear Files,” published June 15, raise questions about roughly $1.8 million in transfers labeled as loan repayments from a Cypriot company to Belarusian tycoon Aliaksei Aleksin, processed in 2017–2018 through Vanuatu’s Pacific Private Bank and a tiny New Zealand payments firm, Worldclear, that was later struck off. Reporters found some transfers had been rejected elsewhere before being repackaged — a compliance red flag worth deeper examination. The Vanuatu–New Zealand nexus for high-risk payments is a thread TIJ should pull.
The structural backdrop. Transparency International’s most recent Corruption Perceptions Index, released in early 2026, put the global average at a record-low 42, with more than two-thirds of countries scoring below 50 — the sober context against which each of this week’s cases should be read (index here). Three investigative avenues stand out for follow-up: Dubai’s persistence as a repository for politically exposed wealth; Rwanda’s role as a conduit for Congolese gold; and the rise of ruble-pegged stablecoins as a parallel settlement rail for a sanctioned economy.
Sources & primary documents
OCCRP: Russian payment agents on Telegram; Gabon / OpenLux; Turkish betting magnate; Worldclear Files. U.S. Treasury/OFAC: Sudan designations and press release; DRC designations. FATF: June 2026 monitored jurisdictions; Treasury plenary readout. U.K. National Crime Agency: Operation Destabilise. U.K. Serious Fraud Office: director’s address. Transparency International: Corruption Perceptions Index 2025.