Author: tio

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The Kazakh authorities arrested a prominent opposition blogger and anti-corruption activist on Wednesday, accusing him of orchestrating an elaborate scheme to fabricate public outrage by paying “low-income individuals” to chop down trees in public parks.

The country’s Prosecutor General’s Office announced that the activist, Sanzhar Bokayev, was detained on suspicion of spreading false information to “negatively shape public opinion.” Additionally, prosecutors accused him of embezzling a “particularly large sum of money through fraud.”

The arrest of Bokayev, 44, sidelines a vocal government critic who has built a substantial online following by exposing urban mismanagement and alleged corruption in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city. According to his allies, Bokayev had spent several months in the United States but recently chose to return to Kazakhstan, fully aware of the high risk of imprisonment.

Bokayev is best known for producing viral social media videos that document urban development failures. His recent investigations highlighted the controversial planned clearing of a local tree grove, as well as the illegal removal and subsequent black-market sale of newly installed municipal paving stones.

The prosecutor’s claim—that Bokayev secretly orchestrated the very environmental destruction he was filming—represents a sharp escalation in the state’s efforts to neutralize his public influence. Further details regarding the embezzlement charges have not yet been released.

Bokayev’s activism spans nearly two decades. He first gained national attention in 2006 when he led a successful protest movement defending motorists’ rights against a proposed government ban on importing right-hand drive vehicles, a policy the state eventually reversed.

In recent years, he has attempted to translate his grassroots popularity into formal political power, though he has been repeatedly thwarted by the state apparatus.

In 2022, he tried to establish a new, digitally oriented political party but was blocked after failing to meet Kazakhstan’s notoriously stringent party registration requirements. The following year, he ran as an independent candidate for the Mazhilis, the lower chamber of the Kazakh Parliament.

He lost in a highly disputed race. Bokayev challenged the official results, presenting over 100 polling station protocols that he argued proved he was actually in the lead. His appeals were systematically dismissed by the Almaty courts and, ultimately, the Supreme Court.

The state’s scrutiny of Bokayev has become increasingly overt in recent months.

Last June, he was temporarily detained at Almaty’s international airport after the facility’s facial recognition system flagged him as a “civil activist” on a state database of wanted persons. Authorities quickly released him, with airport officials later claiming the detention had simply been a case of mistaken identity.

South African lawmakers on Wednesday called for faster investigations into corruption in the Department of Home Affairs after hearing that officials allegedly worked with criminal syndicates to sell visas and other documents.

According to a report presented last months by the Special Investigation Unit, officials of the department had sold visas for the past 20 years, from 2004 until 2024.

“South Africa’s immigration system has been treated as a marketplace, where permits and visas were sold to the highest bidder,” the report said.

Applications were sent via WhatsApp for expedited approval and once approved, money was sent immediately. “Payments were not made directly to officials but funnelled through accounts held by their spouses, deliberately disguising the bribes,” the report said.

Many employees have enriched themselves this way. The bribes allowed them to live a lavish life in mansions they could not afford with the salaries they had.

The Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs said it welcomed the briefings it received on the matter but warned that disciplinary and investigative processes were moving too slowly.

Committee members said the corruption had consequences far beyond the department itself. In a statement, they said fraud inside the immigration system undermined national security, governance, and the rule of law, while also putting added pressure on South Africa’s finances, infrastructure, and public services. 

The committee said officials had acted “in cahoots with external criminal syndicates” to sell documents, including visas, and urged that any officials found guilty should be blacklisted from working elsewhere in the state.

The parliamentary statement follows a wave of official and political reaction to the SIU’s interim findings last month. 

Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber welcomed the report but opposition parties also seized on the findings. The Economic Freedom Fighter, EFF, called the cases evidence of the direct consequences of corruption inside Home Affairs, while the Democratic Alliance characterized the SIU’s findings as proof of a long-running corrupt permit and visa scheme.

Lawmakers said one major obstacle to faster investigations was the lack of integration between key departmental computer systems, which makes it harder to detect irregularities and retrieve information quickly. 

They urged the department to accelerate its digital transformation program, arguing that stronger internal controls would help prevent future abuse and allow investigators to move faster. 

The committee also said the findings pointed to an urgent need for broad reforms in the permitting unit, while acknowledging that budget constraints had weakened the department’s response.

Britain’s company register has moved to forcibly dissolve a cryptocurrency exchange accused by the U.S. of processing funds for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, citing “misleading, false or deceptive” filings, after an OCCRP investigation revealed that the firm’s listed director was fictitious.

The Companies House profile for Zedxion Exchange Ltd. now carries a notice stating that “the registrar is intending to take, or has taken, steps to strike off this company under section 1002A of the Companies Act 2006.”

“This relates to information or a statement in an application for incorporation that is misleading, false, or deceptive,” the notice reads. Filings also show that a “first gazette notice for compulsory strike-off” has been submitted and will be publicly available in ten days.

The regulatory action comes less than a month after an OCCRP discovered that Zedxion Exchange’s “Person with Significant Control” and director Elizabeth Newman — listed as a Dominican in official filings — was a false identity used as a front for sanctioned Iranian tycoon Babak Zanjani.

Neither Zedxion Exchange nor Zanjani responded before publication to requests for comment on the Companies House notice. 

OCCRP found the firm had used the image of a stock photo model to depict Newman in a marketing video.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office for Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Zanjani in January over his alleged “financial backing for major projects that support the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) and the Iranian regime more broadly.”

OFAC also designated Zedxion Exchange Ltd. and another U.K.-registered cryptocurrency platform, Zedcex Exchange Ltd., citing their “connections to Zanjani,” and stating that “multiple Zedcex and Zedxion-attributed addresses have processed funds for wallets linked to the IRGC.” 

A report by blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs found that, despite filing dormant accounts, Zedxion and its sister company Zedcex appeared to play an increasingly prominent role in the financing of the IRGC, a military organization that doubles as a multi-billion-dollar business empire and enforces the agenda of Iran’s theocratic regime. 

Companies House records show that a United Arab Emirates passport-holder named “Babak Morteza” — whose identifying details match those of Zanjani — was Zedxion’s listed “Person with Significant Control” from October 2021 to August 2022. At the time, Zanjani was formally subject to a death sentence in Iran, following a conviction for embezzlement of state oil funds in 2016.

Zanjani’s death sentence was commuted in 2024 and he was formally released last year. However, prison records seen by OCCRP reporters suggested he may have been allowed to leave prison as of 2019, two years before Zedxion was formally incorporated.