Balkan Insight

Actually, we continue to talk about lobbying as a problem in the last couple of articles that we wrote in Balkan Investigative Reporting Network of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

That's my local branch of BIRN.

And we recognize that Lobbying is actually much larger than we thought.

So when my colleague did this investigation a couple of weeks ago, he counted tens, not tens, but I think almost $10 million spent in the last couple of years by the Republika Srpska entity.

A German politician owns a sanctioned Serbian company that helped a Russian bulletproof hosting provider evade US sanctions.

According to Balkan Insight reporters, Andreas Maul is the owner of Belgrade-based Smart Digital Ideas, which has no employees.

The company was sanctioned by the US Treasury Department last November after it took over the IP ranges of a sanctioned entity and transferred them to yet another entity in the UK.

Maul was born in Kazakhstan, but is now a town councilor for Germany's far-right AFD party.