How Journalists Can Untangle Global Corporate Secrecy

A land registry entry in Austria, a company filing in Liechtenstein, and a shareholder record in the British Virgin Islands were enough to link a luxury property to a political figure — without relying on leaks or whistleblowers.

Examples like this shaped the discussion in the “Navigating the Offshore Maze of Cross-Border Corporate Data” session at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in Kuala Lumpur, where panelists demonstrated how publicly available records can be used to trace assets across borders.

Speakers dismantled the myth that offshore finance is inaccessible or unknowable and argued that the real barrier is not secrecy alone, but confidence, skill, and persistence. “Offshore is not a specific physical or geographic phenomenon,” said Nick Mathiason, co-director of Finance Uncovered. “Offshore refers to the practice of recording a transaction in a different country to where an asset is located.”

That conceptual shift, he said, can unlock entire investigations.

‘Offshore is Everywhere’ 

Mathiason said there is a familiar anxiety in newsrooms: fear of financial statements. A former business journalist, he said it took years before he felt confident analyzing company accounts — and he believes that hesitation cost him stories.

“I kind of didn’t really understand the fundamentals of how to analyze financial statements for a long time,” he said. “I self-taught, and I think I missed quite a few stories because I didn’t have the real structured skill-set.”

But financial secrecy, he argued, is often overstated. Many common methods of profit extraction like dividends, interest on related-party loans, management fees, and intellectual property charges are visible in company accounts, particularly in notes sections and cash-flow statements.

Trade mis-invoicing and transfer pricing may be harder to spot, Mathiason acknowledged, but the first principle of navigating offshore structures is knowing which documents can offer clues and which cannot.

The second principle is geographical realism. Offshore finance is not limited to microstates. “Any country can be offshore to another country,” he said, pointing to Singapore, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, and Luxembourg — all jurisdictions with open corporate registries.

Those registries, Mathiason said, allow journalists to track money leaving resource-rich countries and reappearing elsewhere. Once reporters know how to read the documents, “the world is your oyster.”

From Corporate Filings to Global Accountability

Delegates at the GIJC25 in Malaysia. Image: AltStudio for GIJN

Mathiason illustrated that point with a case involving the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, which manufactured OxyContin. After the family pledged to sell international assets to compensate victims of the US opioid epidemic in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Finance Uncovered journalists examined corporate registries across multiple countries.

The work was led by a reporter who had no financial background when she started.

“She was not a financial expert,” Mathiason said. “But two years later, she and our colleague put together a forensic analysis.”

By aggregating revenue figures from subsidiaries, the team calculated that Sackler-controlled companies were still earning hundreds of millions of dollars annually despite promises to divest. “It was all out there,” Mathiason said. “But the thing is that she understood what to look for.”

Similar logic applied to other cases. Mathiason described how a British investment company structured ownership of a Ugandan electricity distributor through Mauritius — a country without capital gains tax. When shares were sold, Uganda received nothing.

“Did Uganda miss $38 million from this sale?” he asked. “The answer is probably, yes.”

Understanding corporate structures, he said, allows journalists to ask those questions and answer them with documents.

While companies dominate most investigations, Karrie Kehoe, deputy head of data and research at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, turned attention to a quieter tool: trusts.

“Another thing that they do is that they use trusts,” Kehoe said. “And it’s a fantastic way for bad guys to hide money.”

Trusts, she explained, are legal arrangements commonly used for estate and succession planning, but they are also used for tax evasion, sanctions evasion, money laundering, and political donations. Unlike companies, trusts often leave little public trace.

“There isn’t something like a corporate registry for trusts,” she said. “That’s why they’re very tricky.”

Kehoe first encountered their scale during the Pandora Papers investigation, where US states such as South Dakota, Florida, Delaware, and Wyoming emerged as major trust hubs. States competed to offer low taxes, strong privacy protections, and favorable courts.

One Wyoming trust services website, she noted, openly advertised “very strong privacy laws” and a judiciary that “upholds the letter of the law.”

Where can journalists find trust information? Kehoe urged reporters to think laterally. Court records are one avenue. Anti-money laundering directives in the European Union have also begun forcing limited trust registration. The UK Trust Registration Service, launched recently, marks an initial — though not public — step.

For journalists, she highlighted one resource above all: ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks Database, which consolidates data from the Panama Papers, Pandora Papers and other major leaks.

“There are thousands of stories in here that no one has looked at yet,” Kehoe said.

Asset Tracing As Investigative Craft

While Mathiason and Kehoe focused on structures, Karina Shedrofsky, co-founder and director of research at the Data and Research Center (DARC), emphasized method.

Asset tracing, she said, usually begins in one of two ways: tracking what a known individual owns, or identifying who owns a suspicious asset. In both cases, the process depends on patience and familiarity with records.

“These are people who go to great lengths to keep their ownership hidden,” Shedrofsky said, noting the frequent use of relatives and proxies.

She urged journalists to expand their geographic thinking. “If something’s available somewhere, the chances are that it’s probably available somewhere else,” she said. “You just have to know where to look or know who to ask.”

Her demonstration followed the trail of an Austrian castle linked to a prominent Russian official named Igor Shuvalov, who was placed on the official UK sanctions list after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Starting with a land registry, Shedrofsky traced ownership through an Austrian company, a Liechtenstein entity and finally a British Virgin Islands firm — where beneficial ownership is opaque.

Rather than stopping, she kept digging. By examining overlooked documents, she identified a shareholder: Shuvalov’s son.

“You really have to look at every single document,” she said. “Turn every page.”

Paid databases like Orbis helped fill gaps by revealing subsidiaries not disclosed in official filings. That led to previously unknown assets in Italy, confirmed through land registries and flight-tracking data.

The lesson, Shedrofsky said, is not about tools alone, but organization. “Some of these company networks get massive,” she said, stressing the importance of clean spreadsheets and pattern recognition.

“Sometimes the most important leads are hidden in the patterns,” she said.

You can watch the video of the session on GIJN’s YouTube channel:

Hanan Zaffar is a media practitioner, multimedia storyteller, and documentary filmmaker based in India. His work primarily focuses on South Asian politics, minorities, human rights, and the environment. His reporting has appeared in TIME Magazine, the Guardian, VICE, Al Jazeera, Business Insider, and other places. He has also had reporting stints in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Europe, and is the UN Foundation’s 2025 Polio Press Fellow.