Following years of global tax scandals, including ICIJ’s Paradise Papers and Pandora Papers investigations, a global accountants’ ethics board has released a new set of standards for tax professionals, aimed at rebuilding public and institutional trust in the tax planning industry. The International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants, or IESBA, published an update to its ethics guidelines last week, incorporating for the first time advice that urged accountants and other tax professionals to take public interest into account when working on tax planning for clients. The new standards come ..read more

U.K. authorities froze a multimillion-dollar London townhouse linked to Igor Komarov roughly one week after the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists revealed the property appeared untouched by sanctions against the high-ranking Kremlin official. In February, ICIJ showed the ongoing connection between Komarov and the townhouse on Herbert Crescent — a prime location in central London — which was purchased for more than $16.5 million in 2007 through a British Virgin Islands-based shell company he previously controlled. There was nothing illegal about the transaction as Komarov, w ..read more

Over the past decade China has forcibly repatriated more than 12,000 fugitives, as part of a state campaign to stamp out corruption, according to a new report by a human rights group. Safeguard Defenders, the Spain-based group, says that Xi Jingping’s government has relied heavily on extrajudicial methods such as kidnappings, harassment and intimidation to “persuade” and coerce Chinese nationals living in more than 120 countries to return to China. Though Beijing claims the fugitives are alleged criminal suspects, the group’s report says that China’s “deeply flawed and politicized” judicial sy ..read more

Not much happens in Bulembu these days. The little company town grew around an asbestos mine that began operations in 1939. By the 1960s, Havelock Mine was one of the world’s biggest producers of the lethal mineral, but in 2001 the mine abruptly shuttered amid a plummeting demand for asbestos. Most of Bulembu’s inhabitants left in search of work. Bulembu sits in a green valley surrounded by timber plantations in a remote part of Eswatini, a tiny southern African kingdom of 1.2 million bordered by South Africa and Mozambique. Known as Swaziland until its king unilaterally changed its name in 20 ..read more

Against a backdrop of rolling hills and sugar cane fields, a generous stretch of cleared land borders the small industrial town of Matsapha in central Eswatini, a tiny landlocked African country between South Africa and Mozambique. Musa Motsa, a 51-year-old farmworker and father of six, grew up on this land. He and his family used to grow cabbage and other crops here and collected water from a nearby spring. But in 2012, they were forcibly removed — along with around 180 other people — to make room for a government-sanctioned “special economic zone,” or SEZ, called the Royal Science and Techno ..read more

Swazi Secrets is a cross-border investigation that reveals Eswatini’s unexplored role as a possible conduit in southern Africa’s gold smuggling economy — and how the absolute monarchy’s weak anti-money laundering controls enable figures close to the royal family to benefit from proximity to the king. The project is based on a leak of more than 890,000 internal records from the Eswatini Financial Intelligence Unit. These documents were obtained by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a nonprofit devoted to publishing and archiving leaks, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investig ..read more

What is the Swazi Secrets investigation? Swazi Secrets is a cross-border investigation based on leaked files from the Eswatini Financial Intelligence Unit. The investigation reveals Eswatini’s unexplored role as a possible conduit in southern Africa’s gold smuggling economy — and how the absolute monarchy’s weak anti-money laundering controls enable figures close to the royal family to benefit from proximity to the king. Where is Eswatini? Previously known as Swaziland, Eswatini is a landlocked African country between South Africa and Mozambique. It’s the last absolute monarchy in Africa and t ..read more

U.S. authorities are looking to seize a $7.1 million Manhattan apartment as part of a corruption probe into the Republic of Congo’s first family, court documents show. In a forfeiture complaint filed in March, federal prosecutors allege that “funds embezzled from the state coffers” were used to purchase the luxury apartment at Trump International Hotel & Tower for the use of Claudia Lemboumba Sassou Nguesso, the daughter of the Central African country’s longtime, scandal-plagued president. The complaint describes how a web of shell companies, ultimately owned by Sassou Nguesso, was al ..read more

Eight years after the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and more than 100 media partners worldwide broke the first Panama Papers revelations, a landmark money laundering trial stemming from it has commenced in a Panamanian criminal court. Twenty-seven people are being tried, including Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca Mora, the founders of the now-shuttered local law firm at the center of the scandal. The 2016 Panama Papers investigation remains one of the largest cross-border journalistic collaborations in history and has become shorthand for financial chicanery and politic ..read more

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Treasury hired an economist named Owen Zidar as a contractor to help a team of government officials examine a problem of growing urgency. The ultrawealthy were increasingly turning to intricate webs of companies and trusts to move their income in ways that auditors could hardly begin to understand. These distinctive new investment schemes are often called “large partnerships,” and they have become pervasive in the private equity funds and similar investment firms the rich have flocked to in recent years. When the IRS granted Zidar access to its volumes of secret ..read more