"Voices For Transparency" Exhibition Reveals the Human Cost of Offshore Secrecy

“Voices For Transparency,” a new photography exhibition exploring how financial secrecy in British offshore jurisdictions enables corruption, fraud, and abuse, opened this week online and in London.

Curated by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), the exhibit features portrait photography and first-person testimony from people who have been negatively impacted by anonymous corporations and offshore companies in the U.K. Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies, including the British Virgin Islands.

OCCRP, which partnered with TBIJ on the project, has long championed open beneficial ownership data as a proven weapon against crime and corruption.

“The ‘Voices For Transparency’ exhibit brings home the fact that financial secrecy has real victims,” said OCCRP Chief of Impact Alexandra Gillies. “Access to information is critical for investigative journalists to expose wrongdoing and protect the public interest, and OCCRP is proud to partner with TBIJ to bring more attention to this issue.”

The exhibition also highlights the role of investigative journalism in exposing these abuses. Many of the featured cases were uncovered by independent reporters working under the pressure of legal threats and without full access to transparency tools like public registries.

The exhibition is timed to coincide with the Illicit Finance Summit, a major international meeting hosted by the U.K. government this June to tackle global flows of dirty money.

Below is a selection from the Voices For Transparency exhibit.

Visit the full exhibition:

In Person: The Guild Church of St. Katharine Cree, London (until May 19, 2026). Get tickets here.

Online: The full digital exhibit is here.

Ryan Woodhouse

Ryan Woodhouse, a telecoms engineer with a young family, bought £4,000 worth of Bankera crypto coins as an investment in his future.

Bankera raised more than €100m from people like Woodhouse when it came to market with the public backing of prominent politicians and business figures in 2017. But its value subsequently collapsed.

“You can be financially savvy and educated and still get caught out,” Woodhouse said. “No one’s invulnerable.”

Meanwhile, journalists at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) found evidence that the co-founders of Bankera splashed out on a portfolio of luxury real estate, including a villa on the French riviera. It appeared these were bought using loans issued by a bank they owned.

OCCRP revealed that three main companies had played a role in bringing the coin to market. Two were based in Lithuania, home of the Bankera co-founders; while the third (called Finalify Ltd) was registered in the British Virgin Islands. About €25m was transferred to this BVI company just after the coin was launched, according to OCCRP.

While legal challenges are mounting for Bankera, investors like Woodhouse still haven’t seen a penny of the cash they lost. He said his complaints were dismissed. “They treat you like you’re begging on the street. It’s like, ‘Hold on, you owe me my money!’”

Thanasis Koukakis

Thanasis Koukakis, a Greek journalist, was identified as a victim of the spyware Predator by the research unit Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. After examining his phone, researchers concluded that he had been surveilled for at least 10 weeks.

Predator is highly invasive spyware ultimately owned by a company called Intellexa. Organizations including the U.S. Treasury and Amnesty International have warned of its use against civil society, journalists, politicians and academics.

International newsroom Lighthouse Reports investigated Intellexa, finding three companies using that name registered in Greece, Ireland and the British Virgin Islands (BVI).

Money flowed into these companies from a BVI entity, shielded behind a veil of anonymity. Relying on evidence found in leaked documents, Lighthouse alleged that the person behind the network was Tal Dilian, a former Israeli intelligence operative.

Koukakis told TBIJ how the entities helped Intellexa operate secretly. “[When they] want to hide the procurement process, they invoice through the BVI. If they want to hide money and transactions, they invoice through the BVI,” he said.

Patrizia Schlosser

Patrizia Schlosser, an investigative journalist, found out in 2023 that someone had uploaded more than 30 fake sexualised images of her to a website called MrDeepFakes.

She says she was shocked and angry. But she decided to investigate who’d done it. Meanwhile investigators from Bellingcat, along with the German YouTube channel STRG_F, also looked into the website.

Bellingcat found a forum post, thought to be from the person behind MrDeepFakes, seeking advice as to how to run an “adult niche website” while remaining anonymous. The user also asked about setting up a company in the British Virgin Islands or Cayman Islands and ways to avoid appearing on public company records.

The post said: “At a bare minimum, this person shouldn’t be listed on any public registrar [sic] (as director, shareholder, UBO, etc.). Open to using nominees, opening trusts, etc. What are some setups, or jurisdictions that should be looked into?”

Bellingcat also identified that a key company connected to MrDeepFakes was owned by Virtual Evolution Limited, registered in the British Virgin Islands. It’s unknown who’s behind the entity. Bellingcat’s investigation also revealed the identity of a key administrator linked to MrDeepFakes, a 36-year-old Canadian pharmacist called David Do.

“Throughout my research in the porn industry I’ve always stumbled upon islands connected to the U.K., and it’s very important to make public that this industry is benefitting from the secrecy in these jurisdictions,” said Schlosser. “You can dig into it a bit … but then the trail stops. You can't find who is behind [the sites]. And you can't hold them to account.”

Berislav Jelinic

In 2008, a car bomb killed Ivo Pukanić, the editor-in-chief of the Croatian political weekly Nacional, and his colleague Niko Franjić. Their colleague Berislav Jelinić was one of the first on the scene. “I saw the blood on the floor of the room where graphic designers were doing their job,” Jelinić told TBIJ. “[Pukanić and Franjić] were killed instantly.”

Two years later, six men were convicted for the murders, but an important question remained: who paid them for the hit?

In the wake of the murders, prosecutors tracked a mysterious €780,000 transfer from the bank account of a “key middleman” to the assassins, but after that the money trail went cold. The funds came from a British Virgin Islands (BVI) company named General Pioneer, but because the BVI does not make ownership records public, law enforcement didn’t find out who was behind the firm for more than a decade.

But in 2023, leaked documents obtained by journalists at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) revealed the owner of General Pioneer as Bulgarian businessman Ognian Bozarov.

There’s no evidence Bozarov ordered the assassination. He says the payment was for unrelated business. And the case has never been heard in court. But the level of secrecy provided by the BVI meant that his connection to those involved went undiscovered for 15 years.

For Jelinić, company secrecy isn’t just a legal loophole – it’s a weapon. “[Company] registers should be opened,” he says. “Whoever wants to should be able to see who the owners are. These things should be transparent.”

Mohamed Al-Daqduqi

In August 2020, a massive ammonium nitrate explosion destroyed Beirut’s main port, killing 218 people and costing Lebanon up to $8.1bn.

At the time of the disaster, Mohammed was working at the port for a company managing shipping containers. He survived the blast, but lost a leg and an eye.

“I was inside the car and didn’t know what was happening,” he told TBIJ. “I couldn’t see. I didn’t know that my left eye was gone and that the other eye had glass inside it.”

For more than a year, it was unclear who ultimately owned the chemicals that caused the explosion. The company in question was registered offshore behind a veil of nominee directors and shareholders, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

After sifting through leaked documents, OCCRP journalists found that the people behind the company were Ukrainian businessman Volodymyr Verbonol and his business partners. The secrecy afforded by its registration in the British Virgin Islands had concealed their involvement for over a year.

Following a trail of documents, OCCRP journalists also claimed to have found that the BVI company was part of a larger business network trading in technical-grade ammonium nitrate of the kind used to make explosives.