Saudi authorities detained 136 people – both citizens and expatriates in Saudi Arabia – for their alleged involvement in bribery, abuse of power, and forgery, the country’s anti-graft watchdog said on Sunday.

A group of U.S. lawmakers intend to introduce three bipartisan bills designed to curb kleptocracy and corruption worldwide. They say their proposals close gaps in existing laws concerning sanctions of corrupt individuals, address abuses to investor visa programs and allow visa bans to be imposed on corrupt individuals.

As Israel’s new unity government stands on the precipice of being confirmed as the ruling coalition in the Knesset, things are looking dire for Benjamin Netanyahu, who for the first time in 12 years, stands to lose the powers of the premiership, just as his long-running corruption trial is picking up pace. 

A former manager at the Swedish branch of Bombardier Transportation, a major engineering company, has been indicted on Wednesday on charges of aggravated bribery in what is one of Sweden’s biggest ever corruption scandals.

U.S. President Joe Biden is putting global anti-corruption efforts at the center of U.S. foreign policy, according to a new National Security Study Memorandum released Thursday.

A court in Bosnia and Herzegovina sentenced the former head of the country’s Indirect Taxation Authority (ITA BiH) to nine years for his role in a bribery scheme that, according to authorities, deprived the state budget of over US$1 billion over a five-year period.

A former Ecuadorian official who was arrested in April for corruption, killed himself in his jail cell in the capital of Quito where he was waiting for his trial, a government minister said.

After a five year moratorium on logging in Guinea-Bissau, officials are now considering reopening the country’s timber markets, however, according to a recent report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), that may only reward the very same bad actors who prompted the ban in the first place. 

Lawyers from the Turkish city of Izmir requested on Monday authorities to investigate claims made by a mob boss that ministers from the ruling party were involved in various crimes, including drug trafficking and the murder of a journalist.  

Sanctions can help deter corruption, recover misappropriated funds and assist “the seizure, forfeiture and recovery processes” of ill-gotten assets, experts say.

At least US$150 billion has been stolen and smuggled out of Iraq since 2003, the country’s President Barham Salih said on Sunday, declaring that corruption “must stop” and the stolen money must be recovered.

It was painful to watch even though it was fake. For a whole day, a young man wearing a white mask sat at the most frequent spot in Sarajevo’s largest shopping mall and shredded fake 200 convertible mark bills (US$125).

A new U.S. State Department report “credibly alleged” that a number of current and former Central American politicians are corrupt or involved in narcotrafficking, many of  them being tied to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said on Sunday that he expects to be charged by anti-corruption prosecutors who are investigating whether he gave false testimony to a parliamentary commission at the time of the so-called “Ibiza affair,” a scandal that led to the collapse of his previous government in 2019.

Prisons in North Macedonia are filled with corrupt staff, inmates are persistently being  mistreated and authorities have failed to improve longstanding structural deficiencies within the country’s prison system, a Council of Europe report found.

A federal court in Brazil acquitted former president Michel Temer (2016-2018) on Wednesday after finding there wasn’t enough evidence to support the prosecution's claim that he had led a criminal organization which facilitated bribery. 

Three anti-corruption organizations have filed legal complaints in France against several people including Lebanon’s central bank governor, Riad Salame, whom they have accused of corruption and money laundering.

Iraqi authorities have suspended or dismissed several officials after a fire in a Baghdad hospital killed at least 82 people and injured 110 last Saturday. Iraqis, including the President, are blaming corruption, negligence and mismanagement for the tragedy.

The U.K. government has imposed asset freezes and travel bans against 22 individuals from six countries in its first set of measures under the nation’s new Global Anti-Corruption sanctions regime.

 The prime minister’s bodyguard who lives luxuriously in a dual-wing, classically designed, multi-million-dollar mansion. The son of a railway official who sits on the throne of a real estate empire spread across an entire continent. The city mayor whose offshore holdings control some of his home country’s most lucrative construction firms.