Disputes Intelligence & Factual Reconstruction

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

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

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

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

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