When he was murdered by an unknown assassin earlier this year, Slovak journalist Jan Kuciak was part of an international team looking into foreign drug smugglers suspected of laundering money in his country. In the wake of his death, the team has continued reporting, uncovering more about the criminal group and how it operated. The...
The town of Poprad – a gateway to the region of the High Tatras in northern Slovakia – has been attracting the Italian underworld for many years. In March 2017 we went with Ján Kuciak to the most popular Slovak mountains to find out what lied behind. We started our investigation into the Italian organized...
The Azerbaijani Laundromat is a complex money-laundering operation and slush fund that handled $2.9 billion over a two-year period through four shell companies registered in the UK. The scheme was uncovered through a joint investigation by Berlingske (Denmark), OCCRP, The Guardian (UK), Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), Le Monde (France), Tages-Anzeiger and Tribune de Genève (Switzerland), De Tijd (Belgium), Novaya Gazeta (Russia), Dossier (Austria), Atlatszo.hu(Hungary), Delo (Slovenia), RISE Project (Romania), Bivol (Bulgaria), Aripaev (Estonia), Czech Center for Investigative Journalism (Czech Republic), and Barron’s (US). This project is part...
An Instagram photo showing a Bentley Continental GT V8 doing 250 kilometers an hour reads “We take off. #IAmRocket #Gagarin.” Elina Cobaleva, a Russian celebrity stylist, sits behind the wheel. She is the ex-wife of Veaceslav Platon, a Moldovan businessman, and one of the country’s richest men. The two were married in 2001 and divorced...
Behind the superstructure of banks, courts, and businesses real and fake that comprised the Laundromat are three Russian businessmen whose firms took in enormous sums – Alexey Krapivin, Georgy Gens, and Sergy Girdin. Last year’s Panama Papers leak of secret financial documents revealed the three to be the real owners of a number of offshore...
As Russian tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky slowly died in a Russian prison from abuse and neglect, US$230 million (5.4 billion Russian Rubles) in taxes stolen from his client disappeared into a maze of phantom companies, crooked banks and offshore accounts. Magnitsky, accused of the largest tax scam in Russian state history despite being the whistleblower...