The assignment
The leak arrived as a spreadsheet with no cover note: 4,000 rows of wire transfers, all passing through one Cayman entity, all timestamped inside a single 48-hour window — days before new sanctions took effect. The assignment, shared across three newsrooms in four countries, was to prove that the window was not coincidence but choreography.
Eleven months of reporting traced $2.3 billion from three sanctioned entities through layers of shelf companies to operating accounts in two Gulf banks — with the London law firm that registered the intermediary declining, in the end, to say who had instructed it.
Approach & sourcing
No single newsroom held the whole picture, which was the point of the partnership: corporate registries in one jurisdiction, banking records in another, and court filings in a third were combined under a shared reporting agreement with a single fact-check standard. Every transfer in the published chain is documented by two independent records.
- 4,000 wire records triangulated against registries, filings, and bank data.
- Three newsrooms, one shared fact-check desk, one publication standard.
- All implicated parties given the full transfer chain in writing; most declined.
What the file contained
The investigation published with an interactive transfer map — entity by entity, hour by hour — alongside a reporting-partners page crediting all three newsrooms equally. A separate legal-threat log documented the six injunctions and three takedown demands the partnership received before publication, and how each was answered.
Results & impact
Regulators in two jurisdictions froze accounts linked to the intermediary within weeks; the London firm resigned the client and reported itself to its regulator. The transfer map has been entered as an exhibit in ongoing proceedings, and the partnership model — shared records, shared standard — is now the template for the consortium’s next three investigations.
