All Projects

The Republic of Iran had a problem throughout the 2010s: How to sell oil to countries like China that didn’t want to flout U.S. and EU sanctions aimed at Iran’s nuclear program.

The prime minister’s bodyguard who lives luxuriously in a dual-wing, classically designed, multi-million-dollar mansion. The son of a railway official who sits on the throne of a real estate empire spread across an entire continent. The city mayor whose offshore holdings control some of his home country’s most lucrative construction firms.

Luxembourg is a tiny country — officially a Grand Duchy — that sits on barely more than 2,500 square kilometers of land wedged between Germany, France, and Belgium.

Global crime and corruption thrive in obscurity. OCCRP is dedicated to exposing the complex financial networks that facilitate white-collar crime.

At a recent performance on Kyrgyzstan’s independence day, an improvisational poet known as an akyn memorably called out the country’s endemic corruption in front of its president, top officials, and foreign guests.

Money makes the world go round.

Semlex is an unassuming Brussels-based company that supplies biometric documents such as passports and driving licenses to governments and international bodies.

They’ve been accused of dismembering enemies with chainsaws, assassinating senior government officials and trading on ties with intelligence agencies. They’ve smuggled cocaine — tons and tons of it — across the world and now feed a sizable share of Europe’s drug habit.

Every year, Latin American smuggling networks exploit thousands of people from Africa and Asia as they try to make their way to the United States and Canada.

They weren’t the people you’d peg for success in the world of finance and technology: a group of young men from a small city in an agricultural region of Romania. But they were clever and they had grit — and a unique skill set.

In February 2015, Goran Radoman parked his armored BMW under his apartment building in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade. As he stepped out of the garage, he was cut down by a hail of machine gun fire. The suspected assassin is still on the run.