Ilmars Rimsevics, head of Latvia’s Central Bank and board member for an influential European Central Bank policy making committee, has been charged with accepting bribes and favors including demanding a free fishing vacation to Russia.

Watch Blueprint's new interview with Jean-Jacques Lumumba, a bank executive whose decision to blow the whistle on suspicious transactions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) meant he had to flee the country in fear of his life.

The firing by Parliament of Vanja Ćalović Marković, head of Transparency International’s Montenegro chapter from the country’s anti-corruption board was political retribution because of her fight against corruption, the agency said, even as a court hasn’t ruled in a conflict of interest case against her.

Blueprint for Free Speech, together with Riparte il Futuro, FIBGAR, Courage Foundation and ASEBLAC, calls upon the European Council to amend the Directive proposal on whistleblower protection. A copy of our open letter can be found here.

Drawing immediate return fire, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said Italians, whose country is caught in a vortex of instability and political volatility, need to be less corrupt, work harder and stop blaming the European Union for problems in the country’s poorer southern region.

The Spanish government is currently discussing a combined anti-corruption and whistleblower protection law. For a summary of the missing elements in the proposed legislation, read our new tool here

Undaunted by death threats, a former municipal worker uncovered a pattern of corruption. Her revelations helped bring down the government of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, forced out by a no-confidence vote in Parliament on 1 June, 2018.

Luxembourg’s Court of Appeal has ruled that former PwC employee Antoine Deltour, convicted of a breach of law for leaking documents about the country’s notorious tax avoidance schemes that benefitted big companies won’t be sentenced and ordered him to pay a fine instead of one euro ($1.18 USD) to his former company.

Even as the CEO of Barclay’s Bank has managed to keep his job after trying to root out the source of a disclosure , the European Commission has proposed stronger laws to provide protection for whistleblowers reporting wrongdoing.

Barclay’s Chief Executive Jes Staley will be fined by regulators who also reprimanded him for using the bank’s security apparatus to try to find a whistleblower who raised concerns about the recruitment of one of his friends, Tim Main, to head its group in New York.

He spent two years in jail not for committing a crime, but reporting one – that of torture – and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou’s story of how it happened, turned into a book also launched in Greece, had an audience riveted.

Blueprint has launched it's Working with Whistleblowers Initiative. We are developing the first international guidelines for journalists working with whistleblowers in the digital age.