“All our fears as an Indigenous community, everything we have been worrying about, are coming true.”
Luene Karipuna, a young leader from the Karipuna people in Brazil

Independent newsrooms like ours don’t answer to advertisers, shareholders or governments – we answer only to you. Investigations take time, expertise and the freedom to follow the story wherever it leads. If you value bold and brave reporting, consider supporting us today.

The Brazilian government and the state-run oil company Petrobras are ignoring the concerns and warnings from Indigenous peoples about the risks of drilling in the Amazon – and leaving them to face the consequences when things go wrong.

Last year, Grace Murray on our environment team collected a hundred interviews from Indigenous people around the world to get to the heart of how climate change was affecting their lives.

One of the people she spoke to was Luene Kariupuna, a young leader from the Karipuna people. The community lives in Oiapoque, in the north of the Brazilian Amazon. In January, 18,000 litres of drilling fluid from an offshore well spilled into the Atlantic off of the country’s northern coast. It was exactly what Luene had feared.

Alongside the traditional Indigenous communities, the Amazon Basin is home to thousands of species of wildlife, including some creatures that would make anyone’s bucket list: blue whales, manatees and leatherback turtles. But Big Oil only sees money to be made.

Grace dug into the history of the decision to allow drilling in this vital ecosystem, poring over meeting minutes and documents, and found that again and again, Indigenous peoples were overlooked and ignored.

I want to give my whole-hearted thanks to everyone who contributed to our crowdfunding campaign to help us investigate the links between fossil fuel companies and politicians. We surpassed our £20,000 target with donations from more than a hundred of you. This money will go straight into our reporting, editing, fact-checking and legal costs, so we can take on the biggest polluters and their attempts to co-opt politicians.

It will also help us ensure our work makes a difference by getting us in the right rooms to brief people with the power to change things. This week, for instance, our environment editor Rob Soutar briefed MEPs on banks, including HSBC and Barclays, that are pumping billions into dirty fossil fuels. Our investigations have repeatedly exposed their hypocrisy on Net Zero goals and even, experts argue, violations of their own policies.

Rob was speaking at a new climate conference in Colombia about the transition away from fossil fuels. It’s been convened to bring together more than 60 governments that are fed up with the stalemate in the bigger COP process. Instead, they’ve formed a “coalition of the willing” – and it does not include the US.

Just to give you an idea of how badly climate talks are going: It took nearly 30 years just to get fossil fuels, the main driver of the planet’s destruction, mentioned in any official UN texts on climate change.

So to everyone who supported us, we’re super grateful.

If you missed the fundraiser, you can support work like this by becoming a Bureau Insider. And, thanks to the Reva and David Logan Foundation, your membership contributions will be doubled at no extra cost to you for the next year:

Martin Williams here, Declassified UK’s chief investigator – swapping places with TBIJ’s editor, Franz. I wanted to share our most recent undercover investigation, which I think will shock you.

We’ve revealed how an Israeli charity – Shivat Zion – offered to help British citizens move to illegal settlements.

We caught the group’s representative on camera, as he touted an “awesome” settlement in the West Bank called Efrat. 

“You’re next to the Arabs; you’ll hear their mosques,” he said. “But apart from this, it’s a great living standard.”

Declassified’s findings followed a months-long investigation, working alongside a Jewish anti-Zionist activist who asked us to secretly film her conversation with Shivat Zion.

On top of this, we also found that Shivat Zion was claiming it could benefit from British tax subsidies, in the form of Gift Aid.

Despite being registered in Israel, it directed potential donors to a separate charity based near London.

An email seen by Declassified claims that donations “go through” the British charity, which “ensures the donations properly reach Shivat Zion”.

In response to our findings, British MPs have now called on the government to sanction Shivat Zion and ensure taxpayers aren’t subsidising illegal settlements. But authorities have failed to act.

The Charity Commission says it is “assessing” the information, but has yet to actually do anything.

And the government has been completely silent.

When grilled on the subject in the House of Commons, the foreign secretary Yvette Cooper dodged the question entirely, by simply saying: “No one should be building illegal settlements in the West Bank.”

In the past, Keir Starmer’s government has promised to take “concrete steps in accordance with international law to counter settlement expansion”. But it seems unprepared to do anything about Shivat Zion’s operations links to the UK.

And now, the group looks set to be hosted in London later this month, at a major event organised by the World Zionist Organisation.

Meanwhile, the reality of life for Palestinians under occupation sits in stark contrast to the “awesome” living standards that Shivat Zion promotes in settlements like Efrat.

Palestinian activist Issa Amro told Declassified that Efrat settlers “get quality life at the expense of the basic rights of the Palestinians”.

“Efrat is a settlement – and to live there, it’s a war crime,” he said. “It’s not ‘awesome’.”

This important investigation took months of work behind the scenes, weeks of legal checks and, crucially, it required the generous support of our regular monthly donors.

Millions of people have now seen this illuminating video, but it’s thanks to our supporters that we were able to make it in the first place.

Our reporter Josephine Moulds has been keeping an eye on the Al Daayen, a tanker that normally ships liquefied natural gas (LNG) around the world, but is currently stuck in the Persian Gulf.

The tanker’s owner, Seapeak, gets money from UK local pension funds – and this is a perfect example of how the globalised financial system means we all can unwittingly finance things we totally disagree with.

Last week, Josephine exposed how local government pension funds have invested £8bn into infrastructure funds paying for new LNG export terminals in the US and other oil and gas assets. The Al Daayen is part of that.

Not only is this money supporting dirty fuel, but it's also invested in risky assets – as the Iran war makes perfectly clear. Political instability and global conflict don’t make the wind stop blowing or the sun stop shining, which means investing in renewables makes financial sense too.

That’s the cogent argument Josephine makes in her follow up this week. There are plenty of reasons to be positive, including the strong (if uneven) growth in renewables production. As the think tank Ember found, new green energy production met all growth in electricity production last year. That’s an achievement to give you hope.

Each week we reveal a fascinating fact from our reporting…

An AI rapper “made” a video about TBIJ saying “the media is trying to shut us down” when the character’s TikTok account was banned for hateful content after our investigation.

Danny Bones – a white nationalist AI rapper funded by a UK far-right political party – isn’t a real person. But his anti-Muslim content has been created by people with very real intentions.

Our investigative work is done entirely by humans, not AI. We don’t take government funding. We don’t answer to corporations. And we don’t write to please billionaires. But our resources are limited. Become a supporter of our work from as little as £5 a month.

Read more about Danny Bones here. 

You’re invited to a very special event with Karen Hao, award-winning journalist and author of Empire of AI. As we grow increasingly aware of the threat posed by Big Tech to the environment, democracy and even truth, Karen has emerged as one of the clearest voices helping us navigate the digital world.

As well as identifying and framing the threats, Karen articulates how we can all challenge this new wave of corporate power – and why we should stay hopeful. Karen will be interviewed by our CEO and Editor-in-Chief Franz Wild.

We look forward to seeing you at Second Home, Spitalfields, London on Tuesday 26 May at 6pm. Secure your tickets now:

Next week we’re also launching our latest exhibition, Voices for Transparency, which runs from 5 May until 20 May at the Guild Church of St Katharine Cree, London.

We’re giving a platform to people who have been victims of corruption, fraud and abuse in offshore territories. Those featured in the exhibition come from a wide range of backgrounds and countries, but their stories share a common thread: their lives were impacted by people and companies who exploited offshore secrecy.

The exhibition is available to the public at various dates and times from Thursday 7 May until Wednesday 20 May. TBIJ staff will be present to welcome visitors and answer questions. You can book a free slot to attend here:

With UK local elections due on May 7, it’s the perfect time to get to grips with how our politics is funded. It’s been reported that evidence about Robert Jenrick – once a Conservative cabinet minister, now a Reform MP – is being assessed by police. It’s over a £40,000 donation he got during his unsuccessful campaign to become Conservative party leader in 2024.

The Guardian reported that the Electoral Commission handed information over to London’s Metropolitan police after investigating allegations that Jenrick received tens of thousands of pounds from a US businessman funnelled through a UK company. (Jenrick’s spokesperson told the paper that he and his campaign had no knowledge of where the funds came from, and had complied with all electoral laws.)

Foreign people and companies are barred from making donations to UK politicians or parties. But that didn’t stop five of the major parties accepting illegal donations from abroad when we went undercover two years ago to test their systems. Labour was the only party to block us from making the payments.

It was hardly a complicated scheme – instead of one big donation, we split it into multiple payments under £500. It’d be an easy trick for someone who actually wanted to break the rules on foreign donations, rather than test them. And when we got in touch with the parties, we found differing opinions on whether they were supposed to bar the payments, return them, or report them.

It’s a reminder of how susceptible the UK is to foreign interference – and why we’ll keep investigating dark money and influence operations.