Last month, leading anti-kleptocracy voices in the U.S., Ukraine, Russia, and elsewhere sounded the alarm about a massive donation that Len Blavatnik, a Soviet-born businessman with close ties to sanctioned Russian figures, made to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Blavatnik’s donation was, as one expert said, a clear instance of the “soft enabling of…
Last month, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), one of America’s leading think tanks, announced that it had received a substantial donation that would help round out the organization’s upcoming budget. As a statement on the CFR’s website detailed, a CFR member had graciously decided to help facilitate funding for CFR’s intern program. The donation,…
Scottish Limited Partnership registrations have plummeted in the latter half of 2017, but they continue to make headlines for all the wrong reasons.
The government recently announced new legislation to reveal the beneficial owners of Scottish Limited Partnerships. But this has done little to shed light on the people controlling them. In June 2017, Bellingcat and Transparency International published a joint-report into Scottish Limited Partnerships (“SLPs”) and their increasing rise in popularity, their use in large scale money…
Based on joint research between TI-UK and Bellingcat, “Offshore in the UK” provides new insights into how money launderers are abusing Scottish Limited Partnerships (SLPs) – the UK’s own home-grown secrecy vehicle – to move billions of pounds of corrupt wealth around the world. The report identifies how SLPs have become unusually popular in the…
Russia’s parliamentary elections on September 18th come at a critical moment for Vladimir V. Putin, whose party, United Russia (Edinaya Rossiya), is losing popular support amid economic crisis. Though Putin himself has remained insulated from national dissatisfaction, United Russia has not, threatening the party’s dominance and Putin’s own interests. After all, it is from United Russia…
When most people think about open source research, they think about uncovering social media materials of soldiers on the front-lines of the wars in Ukraine and Syria, or geolocating video footage of significant events with Google Earth. While open source materials have led a mini-revolution in how conflicts are reported online, there is another area where there…
On January 23, the 112 Ukraine television channel aired an investigation into a former Ukrainian prosecutor who, among other things, reportedly purchased a Ferrari for his 13-year old son. This former prosecutor, Aleksandr Nikolayevich Bondarenko (Oleksandr Mikolayovich in Ukrainian), was appointed during the years of Viktor Yanukovych’s presidency in Ukraine, and was lustrated in late 2014. Bellingcat…
Transparency International’s Government Defence Index is a unique resource that collects evidence and insights on malpractice in the defence and security sector, worldwide. The most recent version was released today. As the majority of the research for this project involved gathering openly accessible information online (with a very limited part of the evidence coming from closed sources),…
Recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, found himself embroiled in a scandal over his wristwatch, which was prominently displayed during his wedding to former Olympic ice dancer Tatiana Navka. Anti-corruption activist and Kremlin opponent Aleksey Navalny revealed that a watch worn by Peskov was worth upwards of $600,000, despite Peskov’s approximate annual…
