The Proxy Platform

Series of articles ‘The Proxy Platform’. While governments and citizens of Eastern Europe were struggling with the recent financial crisis, billions of euro’s circulated in an illegal, parallel system that enriched organized crime figures and corrupt politicians. The system is built on hundreds, maybe thousands, of ever-morphing phantom companies. Led by reporter Mihai Munteanu more than ten reporters and editors of the OCCRP worked many months to identify some of the companies involved in this laundering scheme. To their astonishment they found that many of these companies were fronts for The Sinaloan drug cartel in Mexico, Vietnamese, Russian and Moldovan organized crime groups, corrupt Ukrainian politicians, Russian officials involved in the Magnitsky affair and others. It’s a body of digging, revelatory work that goes far beyond small-scale examples of local corruption and it shows what zeal and determination (often by very young reporters) can achieve.