Deutsche Bank agreed to pay more than US$130 million to resolve an U.S. investigation involving overseas bribery schemes and a conspiracy to manipulate and defraud precious metals markets, the U.S. Justice Departmentannounced on Friday.

U.S. authorities raised on Monday charges and imposed financial sanctions and visa restrictions against U.S. and Ugandan nationals for their alleged involvement in a corrupt child adoption scheme.

Reaffirming its commitment to combating corruption in Venezuela, the U.S. administration decided on Tuesday to sanction two former Venezuelan officials for their alleged involvement in a number of crimes they profited from at the costs of the Venezuelan people.

Boston-based pharmaceutical company Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. said it will pay US$21.5 million to settle bribery and other violations of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) charges with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Telecom equipment producer Ericsson AB expects to pay a record US$1 billion to settle a US corruption probe concerning its conduct in six countries, the companystatement said on Wednesday.

The Washington, DC medical examiner said that Mikhail Lesin, the founder of Russia Today (RT) and close aide of Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin, “died of blunt force trauma to the head,” reported the Washington Post.  

VimpelCom says it will “acknowledge certain violations of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and relevant Dutch laws” in its fourth quarter report for 2015 published today.

A US federal court sentenced Vadim Mikerin to 48 months in prison this week for facilitating a US$ 2.1 million bribery scheme as the middleman between American companies and Russian nuclear officials exporting uranium to the US, reported Reuters.

VimpelCom Ltd. is in talks with the US Department of Justice (DOJ) to pay a near-record US$ 775 million to settle bribery allegations, according to Bloomberg. Three unnamed sources cited by Bloomberg said the Amsterdam-based telecom giant allegedly paid bribes in Uzbekistan.

LC Waikiki, a fast-growing Turkish apparel company, opens another new store in Tbilisi. Poorly paid workers in the Georgian city of Kutaisi produce LC Waikiki clothing.

By Nino Bakradze

You don’t have to go to Southeast Asia to find sweatshops where workers toil under harsh conditions to make clothing for rich Western consumers.  A reporter for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) posing as a textile worker found such conditions in the Republic of Georgia.

Conditions are ripe for abuse in the country of 4-plus million which has no separate labor ministry, no labor inspectors, and an embarrassingly low minimum wage, yet OCCRP found two Kutaisi textile factories that manage to break what labor laws do exist.