Sweden’s famed record for transparency took a hit with the trial of three former executives from telecom giant Telia in a bribery case involving the eldest daughter of late Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov.

In a case brought by civil rights groups, the European Court of Human Rights ruled some British surveillance methods are too invasive and violate privacy laws.

Herve Falciani, a French computer expert who revealed more than 100,000 records that showed potential financial crimes at a Swiss branch of HSBC where he was working, asked a Spanish court not to extradite him to Switzerland to face charges of economic espionage.

With the Dutch bank ING under growing pressure from a money laundering scandal, Chief Financial Officer Koos Timmermans is stepping down and leaving the executive board, with bank officials saying it was done to "further strengthen our handling of compliance risks."

The Australian Government has effectively blocked Chelsea Manning from giving planned public speeches in three cities by refusing to issue her with a visa in a timely fashion to visit the country.

The Netherlands' biggest bank, ING, was hit with a 775-million euro ($897.25 million) penalty for money laundering, coming on the heels of a Latvian bank closing and Denmark's biggest financial institution Danske Bank, tied to also laundering money, through its Estonian branch.

The U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are probing Microsoft for possible bribery and corruption in Hungary over software sales and the company quickly said it had fired four workers and was co-operating.

Artificial Intelligence programs are getting so sophisticated they are growing the capability to learn how to evade the best defenses computer security can put up, a team of researchers from IBM showed when they built a hacking scheme to get past top-tier stops.

Bribery charges against Latvia’s central bank chief, a board member of the European Central Bank, and reports that Denmark’s Danske bank laundered up to $8.3 billion through an Estonian branch show the European Union may be losing its fight against money laundering.

As Malta faces ongoing criticism after the murder of a journalist who was probing high-level corruption, the country’s Democratic Party (PD) said the European Union should accelerate bloc-wide laws protecting those who report wrongdoing.

A year after being fined yearly $700 million for allow money laundering, Germany’s Deutsche Bank reportedly still can’t fully link clients to the source of their cash after confidential reviews of investment bank customer files in several countries, including Russia.

While whistleblowers can often face retaliation, including being fired or dragged to court relentlessly, those who reported wrongdoing to the U.S.’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) were paid more than $45 million this year for revelations.