A legal position may be clear while the factual record remains incomplete or the route to recovery uncertain. Periplus reconstructs conduct, tests competing accounts and assesses the conditions affecting enforcement and settlement. The work supports legal teams and their clients in commercial and investor-State disputes, and in inter-State, boundary, treaty and law of the sea matters.
Scope of work
Factual reconstruction
Reconstructing events across institutions and jurisdictions; identifying witnesses and records; and testing the accounts on which a claim or defence depends. Collection examines evidence that may support, qualify or contradict the proposed account.
Sovereign conduct and attribution
Establishing who initiated or implemented a measure, how instructions moved between institutions, and the part played by state enterprises or other actors. The factual work informs the legal team's assessment of attribution and State responsibility.
Sovereign debt and restructuring
Government priorities, institutional authority and the interests affecting a restructuring or settlement, and the practical conditions under which an undertaking may be agreed and performed.
Settlement intelligence
Independent assessment of the parties' incentives, political constraints and authority to agree, including the distance between public positions and private assessments. Findings inform negotiation and mediation strategy and the assessment of a settlement's durability.
Recovery prospects
Assessing recovery prospects before a claim is acquired, funded or pursued, and as the matter develops. In-country reporting on asset ownership, control, commercial use and the conduct of governments and counterparties informs the legal team’s assessment of enforcement routes.
Instruction and delivery
Outputs may include factual chronologies and corroboration notes for legal teams, collectability assessments, or confidential briefings for strategy and settlement. Expert reports and testimony are separately instructed. Instructions may concern proceedings before the ICJ and ITLOS; ICSID arbitration; arbitration under the LCIA, ICC, SCC, SIAC, HKIAC and DIAC Rules; ad hoc arbitration under the UNCITRAL Rules; and litigation before the English and US courts. Contentious assignments follow the procedural timetable.
Intended use is agreed before collection begins. Intelligence for strategy is distinguished from material developed for possible evidential use. Where findings may be developed for that purpose, Periplus works with the legal team on the further corroboration, records and witness arrangements required, with provenance and source permissions addressed throughout. Assignments instructed through the client's legal team are structured to preserve any applicable privilege.
Selected mandates
These examples draw on the experience behind Periplus, including engagements predating the firm's establishment.
Cross-Border Concession Liability
Reconstruction for legal teams of how infrastructure concessions had been secured across several jurisdictions, producing material structured for use in proceedings.
Lawyers in cross-border infrastructure disputes required admissible evidence of how concessions had been secured, and at what cost, across several jurisdictions. Registries had collapsed in some countries.
In one country, a family account collected contributions from dozens of companies as the price of operating. Agreements were signed in palace chambers. In another, the regulator who approved licences fled when the government fell. In a third, shares had been issued to intermediaries fronting for the ruling family; when alignments shifted, the facilitators were removed and the assets reverted to the state. In a fourth, partnership with customs enabled monopoly access and documentation for phantom shipments that never crossed the border. The same mechanism recurred across jurisdictions: local partnership concealing presidential family ownership.
The engagement produced materials structured for use in proceedings.Read full mandate
Banking Litigation Reconstruction
Pre-trial examination of a key witness's background and affiliations, informing counsel's assessment of the account and preparation for cross-examination.
The legal team of an international financial institution required pre-trial investigation of a key witness. The claimed biography surfaced: legal training, judicial appointment, private practice. It described an émigré who had fled persecution by the regime he opposed.
What the claimed biography omitted: ideological recruitment, military training, service in emergency courts constituted to ensure conviction, involvement with an armed group in a contested region. The assessment interpreted what these affiliations signified across fault lines then at war: why someone with that profile would have been posted where they were, what function they actually served, and why the departure reflected factional realignment rather than principled opposition.
The assessment reframed who would be cross-examined, and on what.Read full mandate
Maritime Asset Recovery
Investigation of concealed oil shipments and discrepancies in cargo records, supporting lawyers pursuing asset recovery and examining potential fraudulent transfers.
Asset recovery lawyers pursuing enforcement in a crude oil cargo dispute faced discovery gaps. Court-ordered disclosure had produced bills of lading, but the records showed inconsistencies: missing vessels, unexplained cargo splits, ambiguous consignees.
The state petroleum company had systematically concealed shipments from its own operational infrastructure, using shadow shipping agents and maintaining dual record systems. Operations formally recorded as non-existent were confirmed through staff who had processed them. Real-time vessel tracking revealed destinations masked through "for orders" clauses: bills of lading showed one port while captains changed course at sea. Cargo splitting revealed multiple undisclosed consignees and banking relationships.
Witness testimony from operational participants confirmed that the concealment was deliberate and directed from above, converting asset recovery into fraudulent transfer claims.Read full mandate
Mining Capital Tracing
Tracing the origins and movement of capital behind an investment fund and its mining interests, supporting lawyers pursuing recovery proceedings.
Lawyers pursuing asset recovery required tracing of an investment fund that had acquired banking assets from major international institutions and mining concessions from a listed operator. Acquisition financing came from multilateral lenders; the corporate structure appeared orthodox, and formal due diligence supported the growth narrative.
The fund's principal capitalisation derived from a deposed head of state, who had arranged the transfer of embezzled funds following his overthrow: discretionary state allocations, undisclosed foreign payments, proceeds moved offshore through physical commodity transactions. Former presidential advisers had been integrated into fund management; officials from a prior regime chaired the mining subsidiary. Introductions to institutional lenders had come through former presidential networks. Multilateral financing had been secured on the basis of a structure designed to obscure its origins.
The assessment mapped the capitalisation pathway, logistics chain, and relationship networks connecting fund principals to state actors, establishing the evidentiary basis for recovery proceedings.Read full mandate
Pipeline Transit and Recovery
Assessment of control over an oil export corridor and its proceeds, identifying potential recovery routes through transit arrangements and offshore offtake.
A creditor weighing enforcement against a landlocked oil producer required an assessment of the one route on which the debt could be reached: the export pipeline carrying its crude across a neighbouring state to the coast. Throughput figures and transit agreements were on file; what actually governed the flow was not. Networks across the producing fields, the pipeline's operators, the transit state's security establishment, and the loading terminal documented what the metering could not.
Control of the line did not sit where the transit agreement placed it. Pumping and metering at the border were held by figures inside the transit state's security apparatus, who could slow or halt the flow at will and had used it as leverage in disputes that never reached the record. The recorded throughput was not the real one; a second set of liftings, absent from the official system, was confirmed through staff who had processed them. At the coast the crude was lifted through a shifting set of intermediaries rather than the offtakers of record, cargoes split and consignees masked once vessels were at sea, the proceeds settling in third-country accounts the production figures never reached. The collectable value lay not at the wellhead the judgment named, but in the transit and the offtake beyond the producing state's borders.
The creditor re-aimed enforcement at the transit and the offtake.Read full mandate
“Periplus established the facts behind the state’s position, including who had driven the decision and how it moved through government. It changed our case and settlement strategy.”
