Trying to combat its reputation as a money-laundering haven, Cyprus has launched a new registry that requires companies to reveal their true beneficiaries - a measure the country said it has adopted to improve transparency and comply with European Union regulations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has marked the state of human rights in 2020 and has further perpetuated inequality, discrimination and oppression all over the globe, Amnesty International said in its latest report.

Opposition leaders and even some ministers in the government of PM Imran Khan have expressed outrage over a new law that allows authorities to jail Pakistanis who criticize or make fun of the country’s powerful military.

Campaign promises from beyond the grave, songbird poachers, and the Hollywood actor implicated in a US$227 million scam involving fabricated emails from Netflix and HBO ― your weekly oddities section, from us here at OCCRP’s Daily News team.

A former judge who fled Ukraine after he was accused of accepting a US$150,000 bribe and burying it in his garden was kidnapped outside a gym in the Moldovan capital of Chisinau, where he had applied for asylum, his lawyer said in a video statement on Facebook.

After they intercepted encrypted messages exchanged between members of organized crime groups, Belgian authorities seized in the port of Antwerp 27.64 tons of cocaine worth some 1.38 billion euros (about US$1.64 billion) just over the past two months, the Belgian Prosecution Office said on Tuesday

Belgian and Dutch investigators accessed the messages after cracking the encrypted communication platform Sky ECC in March last year. 

The U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) asked last week for the public to comment on a series of questions about the new beneficial ownership reporting requirements of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA), according to an Advance Notice of Public Rulemaking (ANPR).

The Council of Europe has called on its member states to prohibit the trade and public availability of tools used for torture and the death penalty.

Police across South America arrested nearly 4,000 suspects and confiscated some 200,000 illicit firearms, ammunition, explosives and components in a massive operation targeting arms trafficking, Interpol said on Tuesday.

British MP and anti-corruption advocate Margaret Hodge reported Lebanon’s central bank governor Riad Salame and his associates to the U.K. National Crime Agency (NCA) for money laundering and corrupt practices.