Supported projects

POPPEL - Dutch tractors cross the border day and night via small sandy roads to refuel more cheaply in Belgium. Since the Netherlands abolished the tax benefit for red diesel in 2013, cross-border trade has flourished with hardly any controls.

BUCHAREST - Dozens of people definitively convicted in Romania live today in Italy.

YEREVAN - Since 2017, nearly 100 Armenian citizens have served as proxy directors for a network of companies that have been used by prominent Eastern European oligarchs to move millions of dollars, shift assets from shuttered banks abroad, and pay for lobbying services in the United States.

LONDON - After the 2008 crash, a few Wall Street investors cracked the code for how to turn cut-price homes into a tradeable asset class worth billions. By 2021, the template they created is being adapted by diverse financial actors, ranging from private equity giants to PropTech apps.

THE HAGUE - The Netherlands is an important financial centre behind the international arms trade. Research from The Investigative Desk (the Netherlands) and an Indian news outlet shows how some of the biggest arms companies in the world use the Netherlands as an intermediary to wire profits to tax ...

AMSTERDAM / BRUSSELS - In February 2021 a Dutch and a Belgian newspaper included a 16 page supplement about the Money Trail project. The booklet featured four full Money Trail stories, plus a 'Stories behind the Stories' section, which revealed how the journalists went about to do their research and ...

DODOMA - Almost $176m that belonged to the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) at Barclays Bank disappeared mysteriously and landed on a Tanzanian national. The funds for putting up 1,000 school structures to accommodate 45,000 poor students in Africa, ended up in a group of people in Tanzania ...

LILONGWE - Taxation treaties that Malawi signed with other countries over the last fifty years are costing the country hundreds of millions of dollars, since they have opened up opportunities for multinational corporations to reduce their tax liability through tax avoidance.

A Dutch fishing giant is involved in a corruption affair and tax evasion scheme concerning fishing quotas in Namibia. The money trail goes via Poland and Iceland.

ACCRA, PARIS - A French official got into wood exportation without paying any taxes on this commercial activity. Despite his presence in the Panama Papers he was awarded the French Order of Merit.

NAIROBI - The three legs of this investigation reveal:

Kenya's enormous betting addiction;

At the same time the Kenyan government removed a tax for betting companies, a cousin of Kenya's president accumulated a financial stake in betting giant SportPesa;

SportPesa has been sucking profits out of its ...

ACCRA, LAGOS - This story identifies the lapses in the current tax systems and how Ghana and Nigeria are dealing with profit shifting and tax avoidance. It exposes how major tech companies, Facebook and Google, use tax havens to avoid payment of taxes in Nigeria and Ghana, depriving these countries ...

AMSTERDAM, NAIROBI - Dutch flower growers in Kenya avoid corporate taxation, using transfer pricing and offshore constructions. The loss of tax revenue due to these practices is substantial and has large consequences for Kenyan society.

JOHANNESBURG - Fourteen of the twenty largest company on the Johannesburg stock exchange have at least one subsidiary in the Netherlands. 20 billion Euro coming directly from South Africa is stored in Dutch shell companies.

ANTWERP - Smuggling, fraud and tax evasion have been the order of the day in the diamond business in Antwerp for decades. The diamond merchants in the 'Square Mile' are living in a vacuum, in a social and judicial bubble that is sustained in part because of the cooperation of politicians and ...