Author: tio

Just a day after the Iraqi government abruptly canceled a $764 million contract to overhaul Baghdad’s international airport amid mounting allegations of corruption, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) told OCCRP on Tuesday that it nevertheless remains committed to fostering economic development in the country.

The IFC is the the development financing arm of the World Bank. It had been advising the government on the project since September 2023, alongside the U.S. law firm DLA Piper, overseeing also the multi-million-dollar tendering process.

In it’s statement to OCCRP, the IFC said that its role was to develop a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) to rehabilitate, expand, finance, operate, and maintain the airport and that this was “carried out in accordance with rigorous due diligence and internationally recognized best practices and standards that promote transparency, integrity, and fairness.”

The cancellation of the project represents a severe blow to one of Iraq’s most high-profile public-private partnerships, a deal intended to modernize the capital’s aging and heavily scrutinized airport. The IFC declined to comment on whether it was notified of the cancellation in advance or had any prior knowledge of the corruption allegations. It did say, however, that it remains committed to continuing its engagement with both the Iraqi government and the private sector “in support of Iraq’s economic growth.”

The termination of the project was made public by Communications Minister Mustafa Sanad over the weekend, but he did not mention the graft allegations. The state-run Iraqi News Agency later cited anonymous government sources as saying that the deal had been heavily clouded by “corruption allegations in the past.” 

Unnamed Iraqi officials also told Reuters that the decision followed suspicions of “potential irregularities” within the bidding process and final contract terms.

The decision to scrap the contract underscores the aggressive anti-corruption stance adopted by Prime Minister al-Zaidi, who assumed office promising to root out entrenched graft within the state apparatus. His administration has moved quickly to signal a departure from past practices; earlier this term, anti-corruption forces raided the home of Adnan Mohamed Mahmoud, the deputy minister of oil and refining affairs, arresting him and seizing a massive cache of assault rifles alongside roughly $10 million in cash and gold jewelry.

Baghdad International Airport itself has long been a flashpoint for scrutiny. In 2023, OCCRP exposed severe labor and procurement irregularities at the facility involving Biznis Intel, a Canadian security firm that allegedly pressured employees to waive outstanding salaries totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The ongoing instability within major state contracts highlights the persistent challenges facing Iraq, which currently ranks 136th out of 182 nations on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.

Two months ahead of the World Cup, Mexico’s financial intelligence agency asked banks, brokerage firms, and other financial entities in the country to increase surveillance of transactions that could be linked to terrorism financing and the profiliation of weapons of mass destruction.

The non-public directives were sent to financial institutions in April. OCCRP obtained a copy of the document that outlines risk indicators designed to flag illicit money flows. 

Experts consulted by OCCRP pointed out the timing of the instruction and the fact that the World Cup context is propitious for the increase of risk levels in financial operations.

The massive arrival of visitors, the increase in cross-border operations, the growth of activities related to lodging, transportation, entertainment, and sports betting, as well as the intensive use of physical and digital payment methods, generate an exceptionally dynamic financial environment, indicated Paola Medellín Cervantes and Mónica Villarreal Medel from the Advanced Compliance Laboratory, a think tank focused on the subject.

“There is going to be a lot of cash flow and that cash flow is going to enter through different sources,” Villarreal warned. Experts believe that events of this magnitude do not necessarily imply a concrete terrorist threat, but they do increase the volume of operations susceptible to being used to hide or disperse illicit resources among thousands of legitimate transactions.

Among the activities that could require reinforced surveillance are betting, temporary lodging services, digital payment platforms, virtual assets, and some schemes linked to human trafficking. “Illegal betting is daily bread in these scenarios,” affirmed Medellín.

Mexico, according to the specialists, has built a financial system that pays special attention to money laundering, but terrorism financing obliges observing other elements. According to Villarreal and Medellín, the first seeks to hide the illicit origin of the resources but the second focuses on the destination of those resources. “In laundering, you have to watch out for the entry; in financing, it is the exit, where the money goes,” commented Medellín, who is the coordinator of the Laboratory.

While experts agree that Mexico possesses the foundational regulatory framework to combat these threats, they emphasize that existing safeguards must be significantly tightened, particularly regarding “know-your-customer” protocols and beneficial ownership transparency.

“I believe that we are ready, but we need to have tighter controls and strengthen the system,” said Mónica Villarreal, a financial compliance specialist.

The directive acknowledges that Mexico has no current record of terrorism financing or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction but that its  institutions still need to keep a heightened state of alert, particularly when it comes to high-risk geographic regions, like tax havens, and suspicious transactional patterns that need to be monitored.

Particular scrutiny is directed at jurisdictions under the influence or control of terrorist groups as well as countries facing international sanctions.

Under the new rules, higher-risk accounts require deeper background checks into primary business activities and more rigorous monitoring of transactions.

“The application of the know-your-customer policy must be based on the degree of transactional risk that a client represents,” the document states. 

Critical red flags also include transactions involving non-profit organizations that cannot adequately account for the destination of their funds, frequent transfers to conflict zones, and name matches with international terrorism registries. 

Financial institutions are required to freeze assets if a suspicious transaction is detected and report it to authorities. 

Financial institutions were given until June 7 to submit the new compliance frameworks to their internal communication and control committees. Following internal approval, institutions have 15 days to notify the National Banking and Securities Commission (CNBV) and an additional 60 days to fully implement the mandatory controls.

As a result, Mexican banks, fintech startups, and other financial participants have spent the months leading up to the 2026 World Cup scrambling to overhaul their internal policies and risk matrices. 

In 2025, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) warned that terrorist organizations seek to adapt their financing mechanisms through the combined use of traditional and digital tools, cross-border transfers, and increasingly sophisticated financial structures.

In January 2025, the United States government initiated the process to designate various Mexican cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO), an event that shook the financial ecosystem and its compliance areas.

Experts highlighted that this decision implied for the entities to analyze if certain financial services could facilitate the administration, preservation, investment, or mobility of resources linked to organizations designated as FTOs.

“Today because of that designation it seems to me that the risk is real and puts financial entities at a greater risk, with the need for them to establish greater controls,” indicated Mónica Villarreal.

The regulatory push follows a rapidly shifting threat landscape. In 2025, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) warned that terrorist organizations were increasingly blending traditional banking with digital assets and sophisticated cross-border networks to move illicit funds.

For Mexico, the issue assumed a new urgency in January 2025, when the United States government initiated the process to designate several Mexican drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations—a move that sent shockwaves through the region’s compliance sectors.

Analysts noted that the U.S. designation forced Mexican financial institutions to aggressively re-evaluate whether everyday banking services were inadvertently facilitating the preservation, investment, or mobility of cartel wealth.

“Because of that designation, the risk is real,” Villarreal said. “It places financial entities in a far more vulnerable position, making stronger internal controls absolutely essential.”

A lawsuit filed by Google against an alleged China-based phishing network may help the company seize reachable infrastructure and make fraud harder for criminals, but is unlikely to stop the broader scam ecosystem, a cybersecurity expert told OCCRP on Tuesday.

“Anytime we can increase the friction for fraudsters it is worth pursuing, but I suspect it will not have a massive impact overall,” said Chester Wisniewski, director and global field chief information security officer at Sophos.

Google filed the civil lawsuit on Friday against an alleged cybercrime network accused of distributing phishing kits used to create fake websites and send large-scale scam text campaigns impersonating trusted brands.

The civil case targets an organized operation known as the “Outsider Enterprise,” which allegedly coordinates through Telegram and provides tools that allow criminals to launch fake text-message campaigns designed to steal passwords, credit card numbers and other personal data, according to a blog post by Google.

The FBI, Google and Lumen Technologies also took coordinated action against the network. The operation reportedly led to the seizure of several domains linked to the group’s core admin servers, a Shopify storefront, about $100,000 from Outsider payment wallets and thousands of domains registered through U.S.-based providers.

The phishing campaigns often imitate routine alerts, including fake package notices, urgent bank warnings, missed package deliveries, unpaid tolls, parking violations or messages claiming that a user’s account has been compromised, according to Google.

The tech giant described the scale of the operation as “massive,” with hundreds of thousands of victims allegedly scammed and losses estimated in the millions of dollars. The company identified 9,000 fake websites and more than one million fraudulent URLs connected to the group.

Outsider facilitated phishing attacks against people and businesses in 55 countries since July 2023 and caused an estimated $1.9 billion in losses according to the FBI. The agency also linked Outsider phishing domains to nearly 3.9 million stolen credit cards, according to the report.

In a two-week period in May, Android users flagged 55,000 spam texts linked to the operation, while 2.5 million messages containing links to websites allegedly generated by the Outsider Enterprise were sent to Android users, Google reported.

The group’s “phishing kits” made it easier for criminals to build scam pages that looked like they belonged to Google or other well-known companies. Access to the kit was allegedly sold as a subscription, with prices starting at $88 per week.

The operation also relied on artificial intelligence, Google alleged. The company accused the group of encouraging customers to use Gemini and other AI platforms to generate custom code for phishing lures and fake websites.

Wisniewski told OCCRP that Google may be seeking “a legal right to seize assets that are within reach of cooperative governments,” including domains and cloud infrastructure. The case may also give Google leverage to pursue sanctions, which could restrict legitimate services from providing infrastructure to the named entities, he added.

The alleged use of AI is especially significant in phishing and scam attacks because it removes “the telltale signs” of messages written by non-native speakers and allows fraud to be conducted at a much larger scale, Wisniewski said. But the international nature of the crimes makes enforcement difficult, he added.

Google said it was coordinating with the FBI, which is expected to take law enforcement actions, and was working with AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon to block scam texts before they reach users.

“The criminals behind the Outsider Enterprise built a business out of impersonating trusted brands to defraud hundreds of thousands of victims,” Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, said in a statement published by Google. “Criminals increasingly use AI to make fraud like this more convincing and harder to detect.”

Google is also supporting federal legislation aimed at improving the U.S. response to scams, including bills that would create a national anti-scam strategy and strengthen coordination between government agencies, law enforcement and private companies.

Major U.S. telecoms, including AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, emphasized the need for a coordinated industry response in statements published by Google. AT&T blocks or labels billions of robocalls and spam texts every month, while T-Mobile and Verizon are working with Google, law enforcement and other partners to disrupt malicious traffic, according to the companies.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

The oceanic phenomenon known as El Niño, which increases temperatures worldwide, has officially begun, according to U.S. weather forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. 

Meteorologists have warned that this could be the strongest El Niño this century. It is expected to drive extreme weather events around the world, including both severe droughts and heavy rainfall, likely leading to major disruptions in agricultural production and food security. 

El Niño is part of a cyclical, naturally occurring weather pattern that redistributes warm air, surface water temperatures and moisture across the tropical Pacific Ocean. During El Niño, trade winds that typically blow east to west from the Americas to southeast Asia slow down or sometimes reverse. Normally, these winds push warm water along the equator — but during El Niño conditions, that warm water shifts back east. Although El Niño does not follow a specific timeline, it typically occurs every two to seven years. 

Meteorologists have warned that this could be the strongest El Niño this century.

Beginning in the summer, El Niño typically peaks around December or the following January. (The pattern was named El Niño — Spanish for little boy — by fishermen in South America who noticed warmer waters around Christmas time, and associated it with the birth of Jesus Christ.) That means the most significant impacts of the cyclical weather phenomenon may not be felt until months from now. NOAA’s most recent calculations show a high likelihood of a “very strong” El Niño, meaning a jump in average surface temperatures in the Pacific of more than 2 degrees Celsius. (Some experts are calling this year’s a “super El Niño,” although some agencies, like the World Meteorological Organization, reject this language.)  

Because it affects a “diverse set of geographies,” said Weston Anderson, a climate scientist at the University of Maryland, “there is no one set of impacts.” El Niño can contribute to severe droughts in one part of the world and heavy rainfall in others — both of which can disrupt growing seasons in key breadbaskets. 

But the ways in which this year’s El Niño will interact with the effects of global warming — and what that means for food security — is something scientists are still actively observing and untangling. 

“That question is still really important open science,” said Jennifer Burney, a professor at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability whose work focuses on climate and food security. 

History can give us some examples. In 1877, one of the strongest El Niños ever recorded was associated with historic droughts across Asia, as well as in parts of Brazil and northern Africa. These droughts, “along with colonial policies contributed to famines in many regions which were really devastating,” said Deepti Singh, an associate professor at Washington State University who co-authored a study on this period of global famine. 

The fatalities associated with these famines, upwards of 50 million people, said Singh, “are humbling to think about.”

The last El Niño occurred in 2023 and 2024. It was one of the five strongest El Niños ever recorded, according to the World Meteorological Organization, and is considered to have contributed to the historic temperatures in 2024, making it the hottest year on record. 

That year came with devastating consequences for growers, especially in arid regions where agricultural producers primarily rely on rainfall to irrigate their crops. Droughts driven by El Niño across southern Africa contributed to increased food insecurity and malnutrition in several countries. 

Weather variability fueled by El Niño will add to growers’ woes.

Burney noted that in some vulnerable regions, local governments may have adaptive strategies in place to grow key crops earlier in the growing season or to increase imports during El Niño years, which can help offset food insecurity. But even in those cases, local farmers who depend on growing and selling crops to support themselves and their families may still experience economic setbacks. In other words, certain policies may ensure there’s “enough food,” but “that’s not going to take care of the people whose livelihoods depend on” agriculture, Burney said. 

This year, El Niño conditions are expected to affect a number of growing areas — another setback for agricultural producers who have faced higher input costs stemming from the Iran war. Although the United States and Iran have unveiled the outlines of an agreement to reopen the all-important Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s oil flows, farmers worldwide have already been impacted by fertilizer shortages and price hikes since the passage closed this spring. 

Weather variability fueled by El Niño will add to growers’ woes. India, where the majority of the world’s rice is grown, is projected to have a weaker monsoon season, which could reduce yields. Drier, hotter conditions could lead to diminished maize production in southern Africa. The southern U.S., from California all the way to the Eastern Seaboard, will experience a wetter year than normal, which could lead to flooding and upend crop production. 

But the exact way that this El Niño will unfurl is yet unknown. As El Niño interacts with the additional warming and moisture currently in our atmosphere caused by climate change, “there is likely to be a change in which regions are likely to be affected” by extreme weather, Singh said. Still, she added, we can expect “the severity, exten, and likelihood” of extreme weather events like droughts “to be higher” in today’s warmer climate.

The post The Coming ‘Super El Niño’ Could Disrupt Food Systems Worldwide appeared first on Truthdig.

Italian authorities have dismantled a major underground illegal bank that moved up to 100 million euros ($116 million) annually to finance operations for domestic and international drug traffickers and organized crime syndicates, police announced Monday.

The illicit bank, operated since 2021 by a Chinese national, is believed to have processed payments between 80 and 100 million euros ($93-116 million) a year over at least a three-year period. Headquartered in the Tuscan city of Prato, the bank had established branches in Spain, Portugal, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. According to investigators, among the bank’s clients were the Italian mafia organizations ‘Ndrangheta, Camorra, and Sacra Corona Unita.

The crackdown resulted in a Florence investigating judge issuing 41 arrest warrants for Italian, Chinese, and Albanian nationals and the seizure of assets worth over 60 million euros ($69.6 million). 

Countries must uphold international law limiting the use of anti-personnel mines, which kill and maim civilians long after conflicts have ended, the UN human rights office, OHCHR, said in a report published on Tuesday. 

Although United Nations peacekeepers continue to observe violence and exchanges of fire in Lebanon, the level is significantly reduced when compared to the weekend, UN Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said on Tuesday.