Before we get stuck into this week’s edition, I wanted to remind you about our audience survey. Since launching last week, nearly 300 of you have given your feedback on TBIJ and what we do.

Your opinion will help shape what we do in the future – be part of the conversation by clicking the button below.

This week we’ve seen major, real-world impact from two of our stories. It proves that, even though impact can be a long game, in the end it’s all worth it.

When it comes to holding power to account, the biggest threats often come from libel lawyers. Firms based right here in the UK represent some of the world’s most powerful people – and we’re far from the only ones to receive threatening letters from them.

But this week the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) decided that one libel lawyer may have gone too far. It announced that it would prosecute a senior lawyer at Carter-Ruck for an “improper” threat to sue – and it all started with one of our investigations.

We wrote about Carter-Ruck, one of the giants of the libel business, with the Economist in 2023. At the time, we reported that Carter-Ruck had sent a threatening letter to Jen McAdam, who had lost her life savings to OneCoin, a multi-billion-dollar crypto fraud.

Acting for their clients OneCoin and the company’s cofounder, Ruja Ignatova, the firm threatened Jen with a lawsuit if she didn’t retract her criticism of the scam. The only way to avoid a court case, the letter said, was to refrain from publishing similar allegations and to remove a YouTube video that it wrongly accused her of posting online.

Jen told our reporter Ed Siddons that this had taken a huge toll on her. These legal letters can be terrifying to receive, not to mention financially ruinous to defend against.

After TBIJ’s story was published, Dan Neidle, the founder of the think tank Tax Policy Associates and former head of tax at Clifford Chance, filed a report to the SRA about Carter-Ruck’s work for OneCoin.

Claire Gill, a partner at the firm, will face the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. An announcement by the SRA says it launched the prosecution over “an improper threat of litigation” sent by Gill, without naming the client or the person who received the threat. (Of course, the allegations will be subject to a hearing and are currently unproven.) But we understand the case is over the letter to Jen.

Carter-Ruck said: “We are disappointed by the SRA’s decision to bring these proceedings against our colleague, who we will be fully supporting in her defence of this matter.”

Libel laws serve a purpose but they should not be used by the rich and powerful to try to scare people into silence. It’s good to know that some oversight is being brought to bear.

HMRC finally puts powers into use

We got some more good news this week when HMRC made its first charges against a company under landmark tax evasion powers. It’s been eight years since laws were introduced to crack down on corporate tax evasion – and we’ve been pointing out for a while that HMRC weren’t making use of them.

But now Bennett Verby, an accountancy firm in Stockport, has been charged in relation to an alleged research and development repayment fraud in Manchester crown court.

Joe Powell MP, chair of the APPG on anti-corruption and responsible tax, told us: “A deterrent will only succeed in curbing criminal behaviour if it’s actually enacted, so it’s great to see HMRC now using this powerful tool.”

Alongside the company, six individuals have been charged with offences including cheating the public revenue and money laundering. No pleas were offered at the hearing, but a provisional trial date has been set for 27 September 2027.

The Criminal Finances Act 2017 introduced new powers to charge businesses in the UK that had failed to stop their employees or associates from facilitating tax evasion. The law both made criminal prosecutions easier and strengthened the penalties, raising the question of why HMRC had failed to bring any charges.

These crimes have serious consequences. The most recent figures suggest that the tax gap – the difference between the tax owed and what HMRC actually receives – was £46.8bn in 2023/24. That’s about 5% of the total expected revenue, and money that could go into improving our public services.

Factchecked!

Each week we reveal a fascinating fact from our reporting…

Did you know?

There are only 14 registered secure children’s homes in England and Wales – containing just 235 beds in total.

Find out more

There are about 50 vulnerable children waiting for a spot at any given time. This shortage has led judges to routinely allow children to be placed with illegal providers.

Last year, Ofsted investigations revealed the existence of more than 900 mostly single-occupant illegal children’s homes in England – over six times the number it had found three years earlier.

The true number is likely higher, as local authorities do not have to report when they place a child in an unregistered home.

Read more here

Join us online next Thursday

Next week we’re broadcasting the latest TBIJ Live event on Zoom, and we’d love you to join us.

This time around we’ll be discussing a recent investigation into AI weapons company Anduril, and how it’s been winning government contracts worth tens of millions.

You’ll hear from tech reporter Niamh McIntyre about the investigation and what it means, and attendees will have the chance to ask questions about her reporting.

There are only 50 spaces available, so snap up a free registration before they’re all gone.

Next up for our dirty money investigations

I want take a minute to pull back the curtain on something we’ve been focusing on more and more.

Our reporters have been looking at CDOTs – the Crown Dependencies and British Overseas Territories. They’re 17 different jurisdictions with a constitutional link to the UK. Several of them – including the Channel Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and the Cayman Islands – are notorious secrecy jurisdictions at the heart of the anti-corruption fight.

(For those unaware, a secrecy jurisdiction is a place where laws make it easy to undermine or escape the laws and regulations of other countries by keeping financial and ownership information private.)

Our Enablers editor, Eleanor Rose, grew up in one of them – Guernsey – so she’s seen firsthand how these islands have benefited from their semi-independent status. They’ve created laws that attract the super-rich, some of whom use services provided by these offshore financial centres perfectly legitimately. But others use them to hide assets from public scrutiny, financial crime investigators … and tax authorities.

Our investigations have repeatedly exposed how shell companies in these territories are used to conceal vast fortunes. In January, we revealed how the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich used a web of entities in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) to dodge millions in VAT on his fleet of superyachts. We also uncovered how he dodged as much as a billion pounds in UK taxes on his hedge fund profits. (A spokesperson for Abramovich denied any knowledge of a scheme to avoid or evade taxes, stating he was not liable.)

We also showed how Rifaat al-Assad used an adviser in Guernsey to secretly manage his wealth, including a Mayfair property worth more than £25m and owned through a shell company in the BVI. Rifaat is an uncle of the former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and was also involved in alleged Syrian war crimes dating back to the 1980s.

Despite years of promises, most of these jurisdictions have dragged their feet on crucial reforms like public registers of beneficial ownership – a key tool in the fight against corruption and illicit finance.

The reality is that many of the biggest global corruption scandals, including the infamous OneCoin, have involved companies registered on Britain's secret islands. The UK’s Serious Fraud Office has revealed that a quarter of its cases involve the British Overseas Territories. This wrongdoing would simply be far more difficult without the corporate secrecy these jurisdictions provide.

That's why, in the coming weeks and months, we’re doubling down. We’ll be on the ground, engaging with locals through events and roundtables. We want to expose who is abusing these jurisdictions for their own illicit gain – and who is paying the price.

To do this, we’ll need the support of generous people like you. Our community of Bureau Insiders keeps us going, giving us the resources we need to follow these threads and turn them into groundbreaking stories. Can you help out by joining them today?

Another bank drops net zero alliance

The ripples of the backlash against “woke capitalism” from across the pond have well and truly hit UK shores.

Last week, Barclays became the second UK bank after HSBC to ditch the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), a climate target-setting group. It followed a wave of exits by the US’s top six banks at the turn of the year.

In the US, prominent Republican politicians sued money managers from an NZBA equivalent group, arguing their coordinated goals undermined competition and prejudiced oil and gas. (Even though research showed that the top investors in renewable energy were also the biggest backers of fossil fuels.)

Barclays said that it wouldn't benefit from the group without the global banks as members. But it said it was still committed to its own targets, including issuing $1tn in sustainable finance by 2030 – a goal it set in 2022.

But how “sustainable” Barclays’ sustainable finance ever was has always been in question. In May last year, TBIJ revealed that it counted tens of billions of dollars for fossil fuel companies towards its $1tn target. The revelations prompted one of Barclays’ own investors to brand the target “greenwash”, and slammed the bank for being “totally dishonest”.

In response to the investigation, Barclays hit back, saying: “The article quotes stakeholders who disagree with any financing for carbon intensive sectors such as energy and transport. We respectfully disagree. We believe in financing the real economy.” It added that labelling the deals we highlighted as “sustainability-linked” was consistent with industry standards.

Months later, however, we exposed what analysts called “an enormous loophole” in the bank’s policy on financing coal – the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel. We found that a technicality allowed Barclays to help raise $2bn for US coal-fired power generators in 2023. This was despite it tightening its coal policy in 2022, saying the fuel was a threat to the climate and a bad lending decision.

When NZBA launched four years ago, it signalled the need to finance the transition to a cleaner economy. Today, that is less fashionable. But the projections suggest that with or without NZBA, clean energy looks like the stronger investment decision. According to the International Energy Agency, it’s set to attract around $2.2 trillion this year – twice as much as fossil fuels.