On August 24, 2024, French judicial investigators arrested Telegram CEO Pavel Durov just days after the United States Department of Justice announced that F.B.I. agents searched the homes of two prominent persons with connections to Russian state media.On August 29, French prosecutors indicted him.

                   According to Human Rights Watch, popular social media activist Steve Akam of Cameroon, who goes by the alias Ramon Cotta, has likely been forcibly disappeared. He was last seen on July 31^st, in a video that shows him handcuffed and in Cameroonian police custody. Thus far, Cameroonian authorities have refused to disclose Akam’s location, respond to information requests from his lawyers, or even acknowledge his detention.

               The German Government is continuing to proactively pursue enablers involved in the cum-ex dividend cases.  On June 24, 2024, the government encountered problems when a German court found Christian Olaerius, the former head of Hamburg’s MM Warburg, too infirm to stand trial. German prosecutors are also going after the outstanding balance of a €14 million judgment a German court imposed on Martin Shields, a British stockbroker in 2020 after he was convicted for his role in cum-ex trading.

                       In an exclusive interview with BBC News, the parents of an eleven-year-old girl, who was allegedly killed by a U.S. diplomat residing in Zimbabwe, have expressed they would like him to return to Zimbabwe and formally apologize to them for his actions. On June 3, 2024, Ruvarashe Takamhanya was allegedly run over by a diplomat on her way to school. Ruvarashe had allegedly been crossing the road with her best friend when she was suddenly hit. Juliana Vito, her mother, was alerted of the accident by her neighbors and rushed to the crash site. According to her, the driver of the car that hit her daughter was not at the crash site when she arrived, and the diplomat’s colleagues later informed her that he had fled the scene because he was greatly impacted by the accident.

                      On August 13, 2024, the International Crimes Division of the High Court in Gulu, a northern city in Uganda, found Thomas Kwoyelo guilty of forty-four offenses including murder, rape, the recruitment of child soldiers, torture, and pillaging. He was found not guilty of three counts of murder and thirty-one alternative offenses were ultimately dismissed. Kwoyelo was a former commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a prominent rebel group in the North of Uganda and Ugandan authorities have detained him for over fourteen years due to the complexity and gravity of his alleged crimes. Kwoyelo is the first member of the LRA to be tried in Uganda, a milestone in the country. 

             On August 20, 2024, George Semere Quintero (Semerene), 60, of Venezuela, pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of his role in a scheme to evade U.S. sanctions imposed on Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA), a Venezuelan state-owned oil company.

         On August 12, 2024, the United States Department of Justice announced that Bulgarian national Milan Dimitrov, 50, made his initial appearance in a federal court in San Antonio after Greece extradited him.  The indictment charges Milan Dimitrov with conspiring with Ilias Sabirov, 52, of Russia, and Dimitar Dimitrov, 74, of Bulgaria to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Export Control Reform Act (ECRA) in an arrangement to obtain sensitive radiation-hardened integrated circuits from the United States and illegally export the components to Russia through Bulgaria without the required licenses from the U.S. government.

         The US Department of Justice (DOJ) charged a Pakistani man, Asif Raza Merchant, 46, with conspiracy to assassinate US officials in retaliation for the 2020 assassination of Qassam Soleimani.  No names of the intended targets have been released, but the FBI speculates that former US President Donald Trump (the author of Soleimani’s assassination) was among them.

         On August 1, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice unveiled a new initiative directed at corporate crime:  the Corporate Whistleblower Awards Pilot Program.[1]  The Corporate Whistleblower Awards Pilot Program is a three-year initiative managed by the Criminal Division’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section.  

        On August 15, 2024, New Zealand’s Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith signed the extradition order of Kim Dotcom to the United States.  Born in Germany, Dotcom moved to New Zealand in 2010 and has fought extradition to the U.S. since 2012.  In 2012, the U.S. government closed his file-sharing site Megaupload and indicted him and three other persons.