by Aubrey Belford, Sarunas Cerniauskas, Matteo Civillini and Ola Westerberg As COVID-19 swept through Europe in March, the director of Lithuania’s Central Prison Hospital was relieved to receive 3,000 FFP2 respirator masks, the gold standard for filtering out tiny airborne particles, like the coronavirus that causes the disease. The masks arrived in boxes plastered with the CE mark, the immediately recognizable symbol showing that products have been verified as meeting European standards.…
OCCRP Without the usual bidding process, Russian authorities awarded a US$190.000 contract to Yevgeny Prigozhin, a restaurant and catering businessman close to the Kremlin, to provide food for Moscow’s COVID-19 hospital patients, the Moscow Times reported on Thursday. According to the Russian Government procurement website, Prigozhin’s AVK catering company was supposed to start supplying the Kommunarka city hospital, which serves as a quarantine for coronavirus infected and suspected patients, on March 5 and keep…
OCCRP Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, cybercrime has grown more than any other criminal activity, a Europol report revealed on Friday. “With a record number of potential victims staying at home and using online services across the European Union (EU) during the pandemic, the ways for cybercriminals seeking to exploit emerging opportunities and vulnerabilities have multiplied,” it said. The mass increase in remote work across the world and reliance on…
