Africa

• South African retailers have urged the government to plug tax loopholes that they fear are being used by Chinese e-commerce platform Temu, and Shein, another Chinese online platform,

• Etienne Vlok, a national industrial policy officer for Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers Union, said the government should consider urgent changes to tax rules on small items to ensure fair competition for local businesses.

• Temu, the online shopping juggernaut backed by China’s PDD Holdings Inc. has offered huge discounts in South Africa since its launch in January. The firm has expanded its global footprint to 49 countries and recently took out ads at the Super Bowl to try and sustain growth among US consumers.

• Thirty-two percent of companies analyzed in Ghana’s fisheries sector were either owned or controlled by politically exposed persons (PEPs), with over 80 percent showing connections to Chinese ownership interests.
• Twenty-five (25) companies analyzed showed that no director and shareholder had filed their PEP status as required by law.
• The Registrar General of Companies in Ghana had not prosecuted a single case of PEPs’ non-disclosure of status or beneficial ownership, despite promises of legal action made years earlier.
• The Fisheries Commission of Ghana and the Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture lacked processes to enforce PEP regulations set by the Bank of Ghana and the country’s beneficial ownership regulations.
• Over 80 percent of companies licensed to operate fishing vessels in Ghana failed to declare beneficiary ownership, despite evidence of foreign ownership ties.

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- The Kremlin threatens to deport Africans unless they sign up

- Officials have adopted tactics first used by Wagner group

- There are 35,000-37,000 African students currently in Russia, according to Yevgeny Primakov head of Rossotrudnichestvo, an organization devoted to spreading knowledge about Russia abroad.

- “Every year we sign up about 6,500 students from Africa to study in Russia for free”, he said on Thursday at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.--

The Kremlin has forced thousands of migrants and foreign students to fight alongside Russian troops in its war against Ukraine, adding extra manpower for its offensive in the Kharkiv region, according to assessments from European officials.

Using tactics first deployed by the Wagner mercenary group, Russian officials have with increasing frequency been threatening not to extend the visas of African students and young workers unless they agree to join the military, according to officials familiar with the matter.

Moscow has also been enlisting convicts from its prisons while some Africans in Russia on work visas have been detained and forced to decide between deportation or fighting, one European official said. Some of those people had been able to bribe officials to stay in the country and still avoid military service, said the official, who like other people cited spoke on condition of anonymity.

Russia’s practice of sending migrants and students into battle under duress dates back to earlier in the war, another European official said. Those troops suffer especially high casualty rates because they are increasingly deployed in risky offensive maneuvers to protect more highly trained units, the official added. A spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.

According to reports citing Ukrainian intelligence, Russia has engaged in a global recruitment drive to enlist foreign mercenaries in at least 21 countries, including several nations in Africa. Army recruitment campaigns offer lucrative signing bonuses and salaries for those who’ll join up as contract soldiers. Recruiters have also targeted migrants and students who previously looked for employment in Russia, and in some cases have lured others over with promises of lucrative work before forcing them to train and deploy to the front.

Russia’s ability to mobilize far greater numbers of troops could become a significant factor in the war as President Vladimir Putin seeks to capitalize on a shift in momentum this year.

For now though, his forces have been grinding forward only slowly in northeastern Ukraine and suffering heavy losses, despite a shortage of troops and ammunition on the Ukrainian side.

The Russian military lost more than 1,200 people a day during May, according to the UK Ministry of Defence, its highest casualty rate of the war. Since the beginning of the invasion, Russia has seen some 500,000 personnel killed or wounded, the UK estimates. Bloomberg is unable to independently verify these figures.

At a meeting with foreign media in St. Petersburg late Wednesday, Putin appeared to imply that about 10,000 Russian troops a month are being killed or wounded and that Ukrainian losses are five times higher.

While the Kremlin has failed to achieve a breakthrough on the battlefield, it has stepped up a bombing campaign against Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. Western officials say those attacks appear designed to make the city uninhabitable.

As he seeks to maintain public support in Russia, Putin has so far resisted a full-scale mobilization and Russia says it has been able to make up a significant share of its losses — in terms of numbers if not the standard of the troops — through a voluntary recruitment drive that has attracted tens of thousands of people.

The government in Kathmandu said earlier this year that it is aware of about 400 young Nepali men who have been recruited by Russia but many more have likely signed up without the government knowing. India’s decision to stop recruiting Nepalese Gurkhas for its army, ending a 200-year-old tradition, may have encouraged Nepalis to look for work in Russia and elsewhere.

A senior Ukrainian official said they have seen an uptick in the number of foreign fighters among the prisoners Ukraine has captured on the battlefield. Africans and Nepalis have been particularly common, they said.

Some of Ukraine’s allies have been considering sharing what they know with the affected countries, another European official said.

Group of Seven nations, who will hold a leaders’ summit in Italy next week, have been trying to persuade countries from the so-called Global South to offer more support to Ukraine. But many of those nations have instead remained neutral, while their populations have been a focus for Moscow’s disinformation efforts.

Reuters reported last year that the mercenary group Wagner had recruited several African citizens as part of a drive to enlist convicts from Russian prisons for its forces in Ukraine. The news agency traced the story of three men from Tanzania, Zambia and the Ivory Coast.

There are 35,000-37,000 African students currently in Russia, according to Yevgeny Primakov head of Rossotrudnichestvo, an organization devoted to spreading knowledge about Russia abroad.

“Every year we sign up about 6,500 students from Africa to study in Russia for free”, he said on Thursday at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

Twenty-two Chinese nationals have pleaded guilty to committing cyber-related crimes in Zambia.

They are among 77 suspects who were arrested in April in connection to what authorities described as a "sophisticated internet fraud syndicate".

The swoop on a Chinese-run company in the capital, Lusaka, followed an alarming rise in internet fraud cases in the country, targeting people in countries around the world.

The Chinese nationals are set to be sentenced on Friday, local media report.

There have been increasing cases of Zambians losing money from their mobile and bank accounts through money-laundering schemes which extend to other foreign countries, the Drug Enforcement Commission (DEC) said in April.

People in countries including Singapore, Peru, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and others across Africa have also been targeted in the online scam, Zambian authorities said.

Dozens of young Zambians were also arrested after allegedly being recruited to be call-centre agents in the fraudulent activities, including internet fraud and online scams, the DEC said during the arrests.

After a trial lasting several weeks, the 22 Chinese nationals, including one female, pleaded guilty to three charges - computer-related misrepresentation, identity-related crimes, and illegally operating a network or service.

The 22, along with a Cameroonian national, were charged with manipulating people's identities online with intent to scam them.

The accused hold different positions in the Chinese-run Golden Top Support Services, the company at the centre of the raid.

The company, located in Roma, an upmarket suburb of Lusaka, is yet to comment on the allegations.

Li Xianlin, believed to be the director of the company, was charged with operating the network without a licence from the Zambian authorities.

On Tuesday, the state prosecutor requested the court to include more details about the charges.

The Zambian nationals were charged in April and released on bail so they could help the authorities with their investigations.

Authorities said the Zambians involved had been tasked "with engaging in deceptive conversations with unsuspecting mobile users across various platforms such as WhatsApp, Telegram, chatrooms and others, using scripted dialogues".

Among equipment seized were devices allowing callers to disguise their location and thousands of Sim cards.

During the raid, 11 Sim boxes were discovered - these are devices that can route calls across genuine phone networks.

More than 13,000 Sim cards, both local and foreign, were also confiscated, demonstrating "the extent of the operation's reach," according to the DEC.

Two firearms and about 78 rounds of ammunition were confiscated and two vehicles, belonging to a Chinese national linked to the business, were also impounded during the raid.

Sudan’s deputy leader is traveling to Russia for talks, days after the North African nation’s army said it may get weapons in exchange for letting the Kremlin establish a military fueling station on the Red Sea coast.

Former rebel leader Malik Agar will meet President Vladimir Putin to discuss Sudanese-Russian relations and ways to improve ties, according to a statement from Sudan’s military-backed government on Monday. The Sudanese ministers of finance, mining and foreign affairs are also on the several-day trip that includes attendance at an economic forum in St. Petersburg, it said.

Russia has long coveted a foothold on Sudan’s 530-mile (853-kilometer) coastline, seeking to gain influence on one of the world’s busiest shipping corridors that lies south of the Suez Canal. Its navy officials also visited Sudan’s neighbor Eritrea in April to discuss deepening ties in the defense, security and mining industries.

Read More: Sudan’s Army Deepens Ties With Russia, Iran as Civil War Rages

Sudan’s move is likely to stoke Western concern about Russia’s growing profile in Africa, where Moscow has also forged tight relations with governments in Mali and the Central African Republic. The initiative comes as the Sudanese military strives to regain swathes of territory lost to the Rapid Support Forces militia in a civil war that erupted in April 2023 and may have killed as many as 150,000 people.

Another source of unease for the US and its allies comes from the Sudanese army’s revitalized ties with Iran. The Islamic Republic has supplied armed drones that have helped the military regain control of much of the capital, Khartoum.

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The China-linked threat actor known as Sharp Panda has expanded their targeting to include governmental organizations in Africa and the Caribbean as part of an ongoing cyber espionage campaign.

"The campaign adopts Cobalt Strike Beacon as the payload, enabling backdoor functionalities like C2 communication and command execution while minimizing the exposure of their custom tools," Check Point said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This refined approach suggests a deeper understanding of their targets."

The Israeli cybersecurity firm is tracking the activity under a new name Sharp Dragon, describing the adversary as careful in its targeting, while at the same time broadening its reconnaissance efforts.

The adversary first came to light in June 2021, when it was detected targeting a Southeast Asian government to deploy a backdoor on Windows systems dubbed VictoryDLL.

Subsequent attacks mounted by Sharp Dragon have set their sights on high-profile government entities in Southeast Asia to deliver the Soul modular malware framework, which is then used to receive additional components from an actor-controlled server to facilitate information gathering.

Evidence suggests the Soul backdoor has been in the works since October 2017, adopting features from Gh0st RAT – malware commonly associated with a diverse range of Chinese threat actors – and other publicly available tools.

Another set of attacks attributed to the threat actors has targeted high-level government officials from G20 nations as recently as June 2023, indicating continued focus on governmental bodies for information gathering.

Key to Sharp Panda's operations is the exploitation of 1-day security flaws (e.g., CVE-2023-0669) to infiltrate infrastructure for later use as command-and-control (C2) servers. Another notable aspect is the use of the legitimate adversary simulation framework Cobalt Strike over custom backdoors.

What's more, the latest set of attacks aimed at governments in Africa and the Caribbean demonstrate an expansion of their original attack goals, with the modus operandi involving utilizing compromised high-profile email accounts in Southeast Asia to send out phishing emails to infect new targets in the two regions.

These messages bear malicious attachments that leverage the Royal Road Rich Text Format (RTF) weaponizer to drop a downloader named 5.t that's responsible for conducting reconnaissance and launching Cobalt Strike Beacon, allowing the attackers to gather information about the target environment.

The use of Cobalt Strike as a backdoor not only minimizes the exposure of custom tools but also suggests a "refined approach to target assessment," Check Point added.

In a sign that the threat actor is continuously refining its tactics, recent attack sequences have been observed using executables disguised as documents to kick-off the infection, as opposed to relying on a Word document utilizing a remote template to download an RTF file weaponized with Royal Road.

"Sharp Dragon's strategic expansion towards Africa and the Caribbean signifies a broader effort by Chinese cyber actors to enhance their presence and influence in these regions."

The findings come the same day Palo Alto Networks uncovered details of a campaign codenamed Operation Diplomatic Specter that has been targeting diplomatic missions and governments in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia since at least late 2022. The attacks have been linked to a Chinese threat actor dubbed TGR-STA-0043 (formerly CL-STA-0043).

The sustained strategic intrusions by Chinese threat actors in Africa against key industrial sectors, such as telecom service providers, financial institutions, and governmental bodies, align with the nation's technological agenda in the region, tying into its Digital Silk Road (DSR) project announced in 2015.

"These attacks conspicuously align with China's broader soft power and technological agenda in the region, focusing on critical areas such as the telecommunication sector, financial institutions, and governmental bodies," SentinelOne security researcher Tom Hegel previously noted in September 2023.

The development also follows a report from Google-owned Mandiant that highlighted China's use of proxy networks referred to as operational relay box networks (ORBs) to obscure their origins when carrying out espionage operations and achieve higher success rates in gaining and maintaining access to high-value networks.

"Building networks of compromised devices allows ORB network administrators to easily grow the size of their ORB network with little effort and create a constantly evolving mesh network that can be used to conceal espionage operations," Mandiant researcher Michael Raggi said.

One such network ORB3 (aka SPACEHOP) is said to have been leveraged by multiple China-nexus threat actors, including APT5 and APT15, while another network named FLORAHOX – which comprises devices recruited by the router implant FLOWERWATER – has been put to use by APT31.

"Use of ORB networks to proxy traffic in a compromised network is not a new tactic, nor is it unique to China-nexus cyber espionage actors," Raggi said. "We have tracked China-nexus cyber espionage using these tactics as part of a broader evolution toward more purposeful, stealthy, and effective operations."

Europe supports, finances and is directly involved in these clandestine operations in North African countries to dump tens of thousands of Black people in the desert or remote areas each year to prevent them from coming to the EU.

An investigation reveals that in Morocco, Mauritania and Tunisia, refugees and migrant workers, some of whom were on their way towards Europe, as well as people who had legal status and established livelihoods in these countries, are apprehended based on the colour of their skin, loaded onto buses and driven to the middle of nowhere, often arid desert areas.

There, they are left without any assistance, water or food, leaving them at risk of kidnapping, extortion, torture, sexual violence, and, in the worst instances, death. Others are taken to border areas where they are reportedly sold by the authorities to human traffickers and gangs who torture them for ransom.

Funds for these desert dumps have been paid under the guise of “migration management” with the EU claiming that the money doesn’t support human rights abuses against sub-Saharan African communities in North Africa. Brussels claims publicly that it closely monitors how this money is spent. But the reality is different.

In a year-long investigation with the Washington Post, Enass, Der Spiegel, El Pais, IrpiMedia, ARD, Inkyfada and Le Monde, we reveal that Europe knowingly funds, and in some instances is directly involved in systematic racial profiling detention and expulsion of Black communities across at least three North African countries.

Our findings show that in Morocco, Mauritania and Tunisia, refugees and migrant workers, some of whom were on their way towards Europe, as well as people who had legal status and established livelihoods in these countries, are apprehended based on the colour of their skin, loaded onto buses and driven to the middle of nowhere, often arid desert areas.

There, they are left without any assistance, water or food, leaving them at risk of kidnapping, extortion, torture, sexual violence, and, in the worst instances, death. Others are taken to border areas where they are reportedly sold by the authorities to human traffickers and gangs who torture them for ransom.

This investigation amounts to the most comprehensive attempt yet to document European knowledge and involvement with anti-migrant, racially motivated operations in North Africa. It exposes how not only has this system of mass displacement and abuse been known about in Brussels for years, but that it is run thanks to money, vehicles, equipment, intelligence and security forces provided by the EU and European countries.

Methods

The team interviewed more than 50 survivors of these expulsions across Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia – all of whom were from Sub-Saharan or West African countries – which helped us to recognise the systematic and racially-motivated nature of the practices. Some survivors supplied visual material and/or location data from their journey, which we were able to geolocate to support their accounts and map out what happened.

The team interviewed more than 50 survivors of these expulsions across Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia – all of whom were from Sub-Saharan or West African countries – which helped us to recognise the systematic and racially-motivated nature of the practices. Some survivors supplied visual material and/or location data from their journey, which we were able to geolocate to support their accounts and map out what happened.

As well as visual material supplied by survivors, we used open source methods to find videos posted on social media purporting to show dumps taking place. We sought to geolocate and verify these cases. In the case of Tunisia, we were able to verify 13 incidents that occurred between July 2023 and May 2024 in which groups of Black people were rounded up in cities or at ports and driven many miles away, usually close to the Libyan or Algerian borders, and dumped, as well as one incident of a group being handed over to Libyan security forces and then incarcerated in a detention centre.

Where visual evidence of the operations wasn’t available online, we documented it through ground reporting. In Morocco we followed the paramilitaries of the Auxiliary Forces and filmed them picking up Black people from the streets three times over three days in the capital, Rabat. We also filmed people being detained in local government buildings before being loaded onto unmarked buses and taken to remote areas.

In Mauritania we used similar techniques by observing a detention centre in the capital Nouakchott. We witnessed and filmed refugees and migrants being brought to the centre in a large truck and Spanish police officers entering the detention centre on a regular basis. We filmed a white bus with migrants in it leaving the detention centre towards the border with Mali, an active warzone.

By speaking with current and former EU staff members, as well as sources within national police forces and international organisations with a presence in the countries where the dumps are taking place, we established that the EU is well aware of the dump operations and sometimes directly involved.

European officials have expressed concern over escalating operations in the region against sub-Saharan African migrants, and consistently denied that funds are being used to violate basic rights. But two senior EU sources said it was “impossible” to fully account for the way in which European funding was ultimately used.

One consultant who worked on projects funded by the EU Trust Fund, under which the EU has given Tunisia, Mauritania and Morocco more than €400m for migration management in recent years, said of the aims of the fund: “You have to make migrants’ lives difficult. Complicate their lives. If you leave a migrant from Guinea in the Sahara [in Morocco] twice, the third time he will ask you to voluntarily bring him back home.”

Using freedom of information laws, we were able to obtain a number of internal documents, including one from the EU’s border agency Frontex from earlier this year stating that Morocco was racially profiling and forcibly relocating mainly Black migrants. We also unearthed hard-to-find publicly available documents showing that EU officials have held internal discussions on some of the abusive practices since at least 2019. They also revealed that the EU is directly funding the Moroccan paramilitary auxiliary forces, who we filmed rounding up people with black skin in the capital.

Crucially, we were able to match vehicles used during the round-up and expulsions to vehicles provided by European countries by identifying tenders and carrying out visual analyses. For example in Tunisia, the Nissan vehicles we observed being used by the National Police in raids to arrest migrants before they are driven to desert areas match in make and model with those donated to Tunisia by Italy and Germany.

We also spoke with analysts and academics who told us the European funding links make the EU accountable for these abuses. “The fact is that European countries do not want to get their hands dirty,” said Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche, a law professor at the University of Lyon and a specialist in human rights and migration. “They don’t want to be held responsible for human rights violations and outsource them to others. I believe that, under international law, they are indeed responsible.”

Storylines

Timothy Hucks, a 33-year-old US citizen, was arrested by plainclothes officers a few metres from his home in Rabat in 2019. He recalls how he showed his American driver’s licence and offered to get his passport from his flat, but the officer handcuffed him and shoved him into the back of a white van.

Hucks, who now lives in Spain, recalls being taken to a police station where around 40 Black men were crammed together in a dirty room with broken toilets. The security forces took his fingerprints and a photo of him. They asked questions that sounded like accusations: was he a terrorist? A member of Boko Haram? “It’s difficult to describe how angry I was at that moment,” says Hucks. He was then transported along with the other men to a town about 200km south of Rabat, and abandoned. Eventually, he found a bus to take him back to Rabat.

In another case, Idiatou, a Guinea woman in her twenties, told how she was intercepted at sea while trying to reach the Canary Islands from Mauritania. She was taken to a detention centre in the capital Nouakchott, where Spanish police officers took her photograph before she was forced in a white bus towards the border with Mali. There, in the middle of nowhere, she and 29 other people were sent away. “The Mauritanians chased us like animals,” she recalls. “I was afraid that someone would rape me.” After four days of walking she managed to reach a village and found a driver who took her to a relative in Senegal.

Further east in Tunisia, François, a 38-year-old Cameroonian national, describes how he was intercepted at sea by the Tunisian National Maritime Guard while trying to reach Italy on an overcrowded boat. He was then boarded onto buses with dozens of other sub-Saharan Africans and taken to the desert area near the Algerian border. He was able to hide his phone so it wasn’t confiscated by the police, and he provided us with GPS data and photographs from the journey, enabling us to verify his account.

At the Algerian border, François and the group of around 30 people were abandoned by the Tunisian security forces and ordered to walk towards Algeria. Facing warning shots from the Algerian side, they decided to head back to Tunisia. “There were two pregnant women in the group and a child with a heel infection […] We were thirsty. We began to suffer hallucinations,” he recalls. They walked for nine days, more than 40 kilometres, before finally finding transport to take them back to the Tunisian city of Sfax.