Since marrying one of the seven daughters of the president of Tajikistan, a young businessman has built an empire that stretches across the country. An OCCRP investigation show how unlimited political power leads to business success in one of Central Asia's poorest countries.

A former Hong Kong government official was found guilty on Wednesday (Dec 6) of US charges that he took part in a scheme to bribe officials in Chad and Uganda in exchange for contracts for a Chinese energy company, according to a spokesman for federal prosecutors.

Kazakhstan, large in territory, but scarcely populated Central Asian republic, rarely gets attention in world news. The country is most known for vast oil fields and as the largest uranium exporter in the world.

President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan gave a speech on 5 October in which he declared that the Central Asian nation’s education system will be reformed, and “expenditures on education, science and healthcare [will be increased] from all sources up to 10% from the GDP within 5 years.”

The leader of Kazakhstan’s unregistered Alash People's Social Democratic Party, Syrym Abdirakhmanov, has been arrested on a series of criminal charges, RFE/RL's Kazakh Service reported.

On 13 August this year, Lyudmyla Kozlovska was deported from the EU. The authorities in Brussels had been alerted through the Schengen Information System (SIS) that the Ukrainian posed a danger to Polish national security, and therefore to the safety of the European Union as a whole.