When clients call us
A customer has stopped paying and the assets seem to have moved. A board hears an allegation about a senior manager. An investor suspects that a portfolio company's sales are not what they seem. A small business finds that the supplier it paid in advance has vanished. Counsel needs to know who stands behind a network of companies before filing. We take on questions like these when the answer can be found, or ruled out, in records that someone can later check.
How a case runs
- Scope. We agree the question, the companies in scope and the people connected to them, the jurisdictions and the deadline, and confirm them in writing with a fixed fee, usually within one working day.
- Retrieval. Our system searches company, court, property, procurement and regulatory records, archived websites and published reporting across languages and jurisdictions, and archives every capture with a hash when we read it.
- Analysis and evaluation. Analysts separate what the records show from what people say about them, link people and companies only where a record links them, and test the innocent explanations before calling anything a red flag.
- Synthesis. You receive the findings with a source for each, an entity map, a timeline, a recommendation on next steps and a plain statement of what we could not establish.
- Follow-up. We answer questions from you and your advisers, and update the work when new records appear.
Work that once took months is usually scoped in a day, with first findings within days. Complex, multi-jurisdiction cases take longer, and we tell you at the start how long we expect.
Records we work from
Company and beneficial-ownership registers, court and insolvency records, official gazettes, property and vessel registers, procurement and grant data, sanctions and regulatory lists, archived web pages, domain history, and reporting by established media. Where a question needs enquiries on the ground, we say so before we make them and record how each one was made.
What we will not do
We do not obtain information by deception, buy stolen data, access private accounts or monitor anyone's communications. We decline work whose real purpose is to intimidate a journalist, a whistleblower or a witness. Our acceptable use policy sets out the rest.
Working with counsel
Many investigations reach us through law firms. We can work under their instruction so that our work stays within their privilege, and we write reports that can be exhibited: every finding is tied to a dated record, and the evidence pack lets another expert repeat each step.
Confidentiality
Briefs are encrypted on arrival and read only by the analysts on the case. We can sign a non-disclosure agreement before you share any details, and client work never appears in our public dossiers. Client material is never used to train third-party AI models.