Paradox Interactive CEO Fredrik Wester hinted that the publisher was looking to make a game similar to the old Syndicate as rumours of Starbreeze's FPS take on the old Bullfrog classic began to surface. As it turns out Paradox Interactive are indeed developing a game called Cartel, as revealed in an interview on Rock, Paper, Shotgun where producer Shams Jorjani describes the game as follows:
"Well it does take place within a futuristic world, and in that world the cartels do have the power to control entire nations. The cartels are more or less megacorporations, and the main goal of the game, of course, is to ensure that your cartel ends up on top. The "feel" of the game is based in that 1980s concept of the mega-corps: OmniCorp in Robocop, for example. The giant corporation that is all-encompassing and evil, but thinks it is doing humanity a favour. We were a little worried that the name had some drug connotations, but it is still actually about the conflict of big corporations.
So yes, you eliminate the other cartels by doing missions, for which you can decide on your strategies. The game is therefore structured in two parts. You have the action mission part and then the part that takes place between missions. On missions you control a squad of elite soldiers and specialists who are controlled RTS-style. There are a lot of different mission types you can send these guys on, such recon and exploration missions, sabotage missions, retrieval missions, assassinations missions, and so on. These are the kinds of things we are currently experimenting with in terms of making the variety of missions interesting."
It seems Paradox are still in the concept stages of development, and Jorjani estimated it would take 12-18 months in production after they had finalised the concept.
Sadly there are no images at this point, but it is reasonable to think that Cartel will feature heavily at the next Paradox Interactive Convention scheduled for January next year.