Experts have called West Africa the for the past few years. poor, corrupt and war-ravaged countries, using them as . What better place in which to unload and repackage hundreds of kilos of cocaine for onward shipping than a region that has and judiciaries that are toddling at best? (And in the case of Guinea-Bissau, .)

By the time this is posted, the end-of-the-year top ten list mania, thankfully, will be over. Among the tedious roundups of the best and worst of the past year and past decade, however, was a list that included one of our perennial topics in 2009: The links between cybercrime and organized crime. According to , Russian organized crime was involved in two of those nightmares. The top nightmare, cyberwar, was pinned on Russian criminal gangs’ involvement with distributing denial-of-service attacks on Georgian government websites during the 2008 war there. And at number 4 was the involvement of Russian and other organized crime in virus and spam attacks.

Five years of investigations into possible corruption at BAE Systems have finally yielded the first criminal charges – . Britain’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) charged former BAE agent Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly with giving bribes for contracts to government officials in three European countries. : The SFO charged that between January 1, 2002 and December 31, 2008, Mensdorff-Pouilly had conspired with others to give or agree to give corrupt payments to agents of certain central and eastern European governments.

Last week’s news that the is out of our geographical area, but the case is so big – the largest such case ever brought under the (FCPA) – and the investigation so unprecedented – the FBI went undercover for this one – that it may be a good indication of where the US is headed with prosecuting this type of corruption.

, dropping at least five major corruption and fraud cases around the world, the Associated Press reported last week. Some brief history on the United Nations’ investigations of possible fraud and corruption in procurement contracts: The Procurement Task Force, which was established in 2006 after the , uncovered at least 20 other schemes involving more than $1 billion in UN contracts and international aid. The UN shut down that task force in the beginning of 2009; cases were instead directed to the Office of Internal Oversight Services.