Tag: News

A firm owned by Hungarian construction mogul László Szíjj — who amassed a fortune under previous Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — donated about $863,000 to Megafon, a political advertising agency that promoted the former ruling party. 

The donations are detailed in two years of annual financial statements from Szíjj’s firm, Vakond Via Kft., which were examined by OCCRP and Direkt36. The company made “cash grants” that totaled 300 million Hungarian forints to Megafon Digital Incubator Center, adding up to about $252,000 in 2024, and $611,000 the following year.

Launched in 2020, Megafon became one of Hungary’s most influential political advertising agencies, mainly running social media campaigns in support of Orbán’s Fidesz party.

But since Orbán’s stunning electoral defeat in April, after 16-years in power, Megafon has kept a low profile. The company’s website was taken offline in August, and its employees have fallen from 72 to three, according to information from a firm that provides commercial registry data.

Neither Megafon nor Szíjj responded to requests for comment. 

Megafon’s situation mirrors the condition of other media organizations that backed Fidesz, and received generous state advertising contracts or donations from government-friendly entrepreneurs. 

Since coming to power, Hungary’s new prime minister, Péter Magyar, has taken steps to halt state advertising being funneled into pro-Fidesz media. Some outlets have stopped publishing, while others have downsized as their budgets dried up.

OCCRP and Direkt36 recently reported that Megafon had received about $12 million between 2022 and 2024 from a firm owned by Lőrinc Mészáros, another wealthy pro-Orbán businessman. Mészáros, who is also a business partner of Szíjj, did not respond to questions at the time. 

Magyar cited those findings in a Facebook post following publication, saying the reporting confirmed that Mészáros’ firm, while “funded by public money,” had supported Megafon’s “propaganda.” Magyar asked in the post how long the State Audit Office would “remain silent” about the funding.

The State Audit Office has confirmed to Direkt36 it is investigating finances around this year’s election. 

“The audit naturally includes an evaluation of news reports and conclusions published in the press, including an examination of Megafon’s activities,” the office said in an emailed response to questions.

It is unknown if Szíjj’s firm, Vakond Via, made donations to Megafon this year. Vakond Via’s 2026 annual financial reports are not yet available, and the company did not respond to a request for comment. 

Vakond Via is part of Szíjj’s sprawling Duna Group of companies. The conglomerate’s flagship firm, the road-building company Duna Aszfalt Út és Mélyépítő Ltd., “won the highest value of public contracts” in a ranking compiled by Transparency International. 

The anti-corruption group’s Hungarian chapter calculated that Duna Aszfalt received around $2 billion worth of public contracts between 2018 and 2020.

Source: OCCRP · 2026-10-26

Authorities in Sri Lanka have failed to successfully prosecute a single transnational cyber scam case, police have said, despite more than a thousand arrests so far this year of suspected members of Asian fraud syndicates who have surged into the South Asian country.

The admission comes as experts warn the island nation is becoming a destination of choice for thousands of scam workers fleeing Southeast Asian nations such as Cambodia, which had in recent years become home to massive scam compounds, many of them reliant on trafficked workers.

Recently crackdowns in scam centers in Southeast Asia have driven mostly Chinese-origin scam syndicates to set up shop in vulnerable states from Madagascar to Papua New Guinea.
Among the countries of South Asia, Sri Lanka stands out for being at “serious risk of becoming a hub for industrial-scale cyber scams,” the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) said last month.

From January until September, Sri Lankan police have conducted raids on 27 suspected scam compounds around the country and arrested 1093 people, Sri Lankan police spokesman Fredrick Wootler told OCCRP and Sri Lanka’s The Sunday Times. 

The figure represents a dramatic rise from 2025, when just 26 people were arrested, Wootler said. An additional 573 suspected scammers were arrested the year prior.

Despite the well-publicized arrests, “we have not had a successful prosecution yet” of anyone suspected of using Sri Lanka as a base for scamming victims abroad, Wootler said.

The issue, Wootler explained, is that Sri Lanka’s current computer crime law, which dates from 2007, only allows cases to be opened on the basis of a complaint from a victim. Since the majority of those getting scammed live abroad, few complaints have been received.

Instead, he added, the vast majority of suspected scammers are being charged for visa violations and being removed from the country.

“The current government is …very much keen to see that this type of criminal networks [must] be taken away from Sri Lanka,” Wootler said. 

The head of Sri Lanka’s police cyber crime unit, Chandima Arumapperuma, told reporters that the majority of suspects arrested so far carry passports from Asian countries such as China, Vietnam, India, and Indonesia. Many come with travel records showing they had previously been in Cambodia or Myanmar, both well-known scam hubs, she added.

Efforts to interview suspects are hampered by language barriers while devices are often encrypted and difficult to analyse, Arumapperuma added.

“The volume of devices we find in each raid is so high, usually about 200 phones and laptops, and we simply do not have the resources to process all of them,” she said.

Adding to the difficulty, experts say, is another factor: Sri Lanka is desperate for foreign exchange. The tourism-dependent country offers visa-free travel to passport holders from 40 countries, including China. It has also opened up investment for online gambling and brick-and-mortar casinos, and has opened up a “special economic zone,” known as Colombo Port City, to attract investors in the digital economy sector.

“Online gambling and offshore gambling operate in legal gray areas in Sri Lanka. The country has an economically distressed project, the Colombo Port City. And then it has a mechanism for bringing large numbers of foreigners,” said Jason Tower, a transnational crime expert at GI-TOC.

In contrast to Southeast Asian scam hubs, where compounds have operated out in public view with protection from politicians and armed groups, Sri Lanka’s scam industry remains clandestine. But failure to tackle these networks could allow the industry to grow to a scale at which criminals become a force powerful enough to defy the government, Tower warned. 

“The imagination is the limit. Going from what’s hidden and clandestine to what is open and obvious, “ he said.

“Right now Sri Lanka’s sort of on the threshold.”

Source: OCCRP · 2026-10-25

A Chinese cyber scam boss who was kidnapped and murdered in Sri Lanka’s capital in July went by three separate aliases and carried at least two passports, according to documents obtained by OCCRP and The Sunday Times.

Chen Guoqing, 31, was abducted from the Colombo Port City special economic zone in the early hours of July 23 by a group of over a dozen men, one of them brandishing a pistol, according to a copy of the police investigative report into the incident. He was driven to a rural area over 70 kilometers east of Colombo, tortured to death, and his body was abandoned.

The murder of Chen — and the hunt for his killers — received extensive media coverage in Sri Lanka, amid fears that the South Asian country is becoming a new base for Asian criminal syndicates that target victims around the world with sophisticated online fraud schemes.

Sri Lankan police told OCCRP and the Sunday Times that they have arrested five Chinese nationals over the murder and are seeking another three suspects, who are believed to have fled the country. Local authorities have said they believed Chen was involved at a high level in international criminal activity and was murdered over a money dispute with other criminals.

Investigative files show police recovered two passports belonging to the murder victim, each using a different name. One, a Cambodian passport, identified him as Chen Hao. The other, from Suriname, identified him as Tao Guoqing.

Reporters were able to find the murder victim’s real name — Chen Guoqing — by crosschecking his Cambodian passport with a publicly available copy of naturalization and name change records from that country’s Gazette.

Chen’s real name is not mentioned in the Sri Lankan police investigative report, and neither his Cambodian nor his Surinamese aliases have been reported in local media. 

Details of Chen’s identity come as OCCRP and the Sunday Times have revealed that, despite over a thousand well-publicized arrests, Sri Lanka has failed to successfully prosecute a single person for using the country as a base to conduct online scams targeting foreigners.

Brian Hanley, the Asia-Pacific Director of the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, said Chen’s murder highlights the vulnerability of Sri Lanka to infiltration by scam syndicates fleeing crackdowns in traditional Southeast Asian epicenters like Cambodia.

“There’s weak enforcement [by Sri Lankan authorities],” Hanley said. “Scams pay. Nobody gets caught. Or if they do, there’s no sanction.”

“For a country like Sri Lanka this level of scam activity could easily start to see a single digit contribution to their entire GDP.”

Source: OCCRP · 2026-10-25

The Cypriot Parliament this week discussed recent revelations about corporate maneuvers that allowed firms ultimately owned by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich to sidestep tax and transparency requirements.

The parliamentary hearings followed an investigation last week by OCCRP, CIReN, BBC, and TBIJ. The reports detailed how the Cyprus affiliate of multinational accountancy firm Deloitte, and corporate service provider MeritServus, worked together to backdate documents relating to companies beneficially owned by Abramovich. 

Doing so helped the companies retroactively transfer billions of dollars in assets from Cyprus to the British Virgin Islands, where they would not be subject to Cypriot laws on tax and public disclosure. 

OCCRP reached out to Deloitte’s offices in Cyprus and internationally for comment on the parliamentary hearing, but did not receive a response by the time of publication. Deloitte Cyprus previously told OCCRP it “acts in compliance with applicable laws.”

MeritServus has been dissolved and it was not possible to obtain a comment. 

Lawyers for Abramovich, from the London firm of Kobre and Kim, noted that he “has not been identified as the subject of any investigation, nor has he been charged with any wrongdoing.”

“Our client’s position is that he denies that he evaded tax or concealed his assets,” the firm said in an emailed response to questions. 

During the session of Parliament’s Standing Committee on Institutions on Wednesday, representatives of several state bodies were questioned about the findings of the journalistic investigation. Government institutions present included the Finance and Justice Ministries, the Tax Commissioner’s Office, the State Prosecutor and Police, Auditor General, and Central Bank, as well as the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission.

An official from the Justice Ministry told the committee that information published by the media outlets would be assessed, and that police investigations would be carried out to determine whether any criminal acts had been committed.

A representative of the Cyprus Public Audit Oversight Board said the body had been in contact with Deloitte Cyprus since the publication of the reports. The representative referred to difficulties Deloitte Cyprus was experiencing in retrieving data and communications from the relevant period, but stated that the company would provide all relevant information as it became available. 

Several representatives of regulatory bodies present at the hearings highlighted general improvement made in Cyprus since the period covered by media reports, particularly as a result of E.U. directives being transposed into national law.  

Tax reform laws introduced in Cyprus in January increased the possible fine for failure to pay the Special Defense Contribution, one of the taxes the companies beneficially owned by Abramovich were obliged to pay. A fine could be as much as 100,000 euros ($112,200) in addition to four times the originally owed tax for repeat offenders.  

Source: OCCRP · 2026-10-23

Riding an extraordinary wave of public mobilization, Serbia’s student-led opposition heads into Sunday’s snap parliamentary election genuinely believing it can break President Aleksandar Vučić’s 14-year grip on power.

Yet beneath the euphoria of this week’s mass rallies lies a pervasive conviction among its supporters that the contest will be anything but fair—and that the ruling party will resort to outright ballot theft rather than concede defeat.

On Thursday night, that tension was on full display as hundreds of thousands of people flooded into Belgrade’s central Slavija Square, filling the surrounding boulevards in a buoyant, flag-waving display of collective defiance. The assembly marked the movement’s final campaign rally ahead of an early vote that serves as the culmination of nearly two years of youth-led unrest against Vučić’s rule.

What began in November 2024 as grief and outrage following the collapse of a newly renovated railway station canopy in the northern city of Novi Sad—a disaster that killed 16 people and was turned by the protesting youth into a lethal symbol of state corruption and crony contracting—has since metastasized into a nationwide rebellion.

Now polling in a dead heat with the governing Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), the youth movement’s “Students’ List” has mounted the most formidable electoral challenge Vučić has faced in over a decade. But across the sea of demonstrators in the capital, few harbored illusions about how the ruling machine will be handling the vote.

“I believe he will do anything he can to steal the votes and remain in power,” said Katarina Zajić, 45, a food technologist who works as an administrative clerk in the Belgrade municipality of Zemun.

That skepticism is informed by years of documented electoral abuse. International election observers, led by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and backed by European Union institutions, have consistently found that while Serbian elections offer voters a nominal choice of candidates, the playing field is fundamentally compromised. In report after report, monitors have cited pervasive state capture of broadcast media, intense pressure on public-sector workers to mobilize for the ruling coalition, the routine abuse of public resources for partisan gain, and deep-seated anomalies in the voter register.

Domestic watchdogs have leveled even harsher verdicts. The Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA), Serbia’s prominent independent election observation group, concluded that recent election cycles—including the disputed parliamentary and municipal votes in 2023 and 2024—were “not free and fair.” The watchdog documented organized voter migration schemes, the mass registration of “phantom voters,” and the wholesale erasure of the boundary between state institutions and the ruling party.

Vučić and his party have vehemently denied any wrongdoing, routinely dismissing allegations of electoral manipulation as the reflexive excuses of “sore losers” fabricating an alibi for their own political weakness.

“These were by far the cleanest and fairest elections to date, and everyone knows it,” Vučić declared following the 2023 ballot, even as opposition leaders launched hunger strikes and thousands took to the streets to protest organized cross-border voter bussing. 

For many of those who massed in Belgrade on Thursday, however, the gap between the government’s assurances and the documented reality on the ground has left them preparing for a confrontation that will not end at the ballot box.

“Vučić never organized fair elections. He never won the elections he didn’t organize, and there won’t be any difference this time,” said David, 45, who attended Thursday’s rally. “The more people come out for the elections, the bigger the chance to win against him. But if he still tries to steal, well, I don’t know… the streets.”

He paused, measuring the consequences of what might follow Sunday night.

“Violence is the last answer,” he said. “But if that’s the answer, we’re probably going to have to go that way.”

Source: OCCRP · 2026-10-23

Brendon Luo was sanctioned in June by the U.S. Treasury Department, which alleged he was an investor in a cyber-scam compound operated by Cambodia’s Prince Group. Property records show he still owns a mansion in a gated community in southern California.

The Prince Group is widely accused of involvement in compounds in Cambodia where thousands of trafficked workers were forced to commit industrial-scale cyberfraud. The Prince Group has strongly denied the accusations, but the U.S. has sanctioned more than 140 allegedly-associated entities and individuals, including Luo.

The sanctions have not disrupted Luo’s ownership of a five bedroom mansion in Yorba Linda, a city of about 68,000 people that is part of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Although no sale price was identified in property records, online real estate portals value the property at roughly $5 million.

Luo was born in China and acquired passports from Cambodia, Vanuatu and Cyprus, according to information from sanctions notices as well as immigration records obtained by OCCRP.  

A Cambodian government factsheet distributed to the media in September stated that Luo was the “registered owner” of Legend Innovation Co. Ltd. That company allegedly operated a scam compound named 8Park, which was dismantled this year by Cambodian authorities.

The U.S. sanctions notice alleged that Luo and another individual were “major investors in a Prince Group… scam compound that was used to facilitate fraud operations.”

A Prince Group spokesperson said in an emailed response to questions that the conglomerate has “never had any relationship with Legend Innovation.”

“Brendon Luo had no role within the Prince Group of companies, nor was he associated with their operations throughout South Asia,” the spokesperson added.

Legend Innovation was sanctioned separately by the U.K. government in March. The U.K. Treasury said 8Park was “believed to be Cambodia’s largest scam compound, with capacity to accommodate 20,000 trafficked workers”.

Luo did not reply to requests for comment sent to multiple company email addresses, and no one answered calls to phone numbers listed for his Cambodian firms. However, a representative for Luo did respond to questions via the Prince Group spokesperson.

“Mr. Luo did not own Legend Innovation and had no role in it, or the construction or operation of any business that was conducted by it on the land in question,” Luo’s representative said. “Mr. Luo has never been associated with, nor had any ownership interest, in the companies referenced, or in their alleged scam operations.”

The representative added that Luo “never held a role of any kind with Prince.”

Luo’s California mansion in the “Enclave at Yorba Linda” development is down the street from a property that was owned by Chen Sokly. OCCRP recently identified Chen Sokly as the person referred to as “co-conspirator 2” in a U.S. federal court indictment of Prince Group founder and chairman Chen Zhi. The indictment charges Chen Zhi with alleged wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy. 

American authorities alleged that co-conspirator 2 was a Prince Group “enforcer” who protected the conglomerate’s scam operations from police. Chen Sokly has not been charged in the case.

The Prince Group spokesperson previously told OCCRP that the conglomerate and its chairman were innocent of the U.S. allegations, adding that it was “not a criminal syndicate but a collection of legitimate businesses serving millions of people and employing tens of thousands of people across the globe.” 

Luo was listed as a director of Prince Plaza Investment Co. Ltd. In October 2025, the U.S. Treasury Department included that company on a list of sanctioned firms it said were “owned or controlled by, or purport to act for or on behalf of, members of Prince Group TCO [Transnational Criminal Organization].” 

As previously reported by OCCRP, Luo’s real estate portfolio also includes a luxury condominium in downtown Tokyo.

Source: OCCRP · 2026-10-23