Selected Mandates

An international telecoms consortium required two years of monitoring as it evaluated, then entered, a state-monopolised market. Liberalisation had been announced, with licences and a partial privatisation planned. Conflict had suspended multilateral financing. Networks across the central bank, finance ministry, prime minister's office, and state monopoly documented what licensing frameworks could not reveal. Reform was forex-driven rather than ideologically owned: accelerated as reserves collapsed to weeks of import cover, reversible if alternative hard currency materialised. The parallel market absorbed half of imports. The economic council was split on sequencing, and the prime minister had not resolved the division. The monopoly's leadership had privately indicated its readiness to bypass regulatory timelines. Licensing slipped repeatedly; infrastructure access became leverage. The client sequenced its entry around which commitments were contingent, how officials positioned themselves privately, and which arguments would gain traction.Read full mandate

Foreign ministries engaged in back-channel mediation required continuous assessment of a conflict through successive ceasefires. A cessation of hostilities was signed. The question across three years was whether the formal processes reflected conditions that could produce a durable settlement. Networks across military commands on both sides, regional administrations, and ruling party structures documented what mediation frameworks could not capture. Senior officers acknowledged the desire for decisive victory but warned that their opponent would reconstitute. Government strategists confirmed: accept a ceasefire, launch dialogue, delay indefinitely. Famine became instrument rather than consequence. Tens of thousands who had trained abroad were denied the weapons they had been promised, and seized national army depots instead. A neighbouring state enlisted against the insurgency maintained forces in occupied territories after the agreement. By the third year, demobilised fighters were quietly recalled. Reporting continued; what followed was repositioning for interstate war.Read full mandate

A telecommunications consortium considering transit through the waters of a sanctioned jurisdiction needed to know whether any compliant route to consent existed. Previous initiatives had secured ministerial endorsement, multilateral commitments and signed agreements. The preparatory loan had been repaid in full. The project never materialised. Another delegation returned from negotiations abroad to immediate presidential rejection; no reasons were given. No established procedure existed, and the key gatekeepers were themselves designated. The assessment mapped seven ministries, distinguishing routes that could be walked from those that ran through designated individuals. It also established why the timing now differed: ministerial advocacy where none had existed, and a zero-cost structure that removed the barrier that had killed prior initiatives. The pathway that emerged was built to test viability through preliminary diplomatic engagement before the client committed resources. Parallel conflict monitoring fixed the window for acting before events in the region closed it. The consortium subsequently retained Periplus to open the channel. One constraint the assessment was built around has since fallen away; the pathway did not rest on it. The questions it was designed to answer were the government's own, and those remain.Read full mandate

An established mining operator required continuous monitoring of decision-making authority across its portfolio. Two ministries engaged investors on the same dossiers; a minister from outside the mining portfolio interfered in them repeatedly. Viability required volumes that a single-track colonial railway, still derailing, could not carry. International consortia returned without committing, awaiting electoral legitimacy. A reshuffle followed: the interfering minister removed, the mines minister retained, renegotiation publicly dismissed. An unpublished directive, surfaced within days, placed a Palace adviser over the portfolio; the minister received instructions rather than issuing them. The adviser had led a sovereignty-driven nationalisation in another sector, opened quietly and completed on his own timetable. The transition government could not renegotiate what a predecessor had signed: state credibility protected concluded terms. But in any signed contract, there is always room for manoeuvre. The manoeuvre, when it came, was outside the contract. Disturbing the signed terms was never affordable. Sunk investment would have to be repaid, an international claim would follow, and a state that needs to borrow cannot expropriate and remain creditworthy. What it could do was hold everything the contract left uncovered. The evacuation infrastructure was lifted out of the operator's perimeter and placed with third-party financiers and builders, to be held as a national asset. The operator keeps its deposit and ships on terms set by whoever owns the line. The monitoring separated protected structures from exposed terms: access and tariff on infrastructure the operator would not own, processing timelines, community obligations. It located where the value was moving before the instruments were drafted.Read full mandate

Pre-acquisition due diligence on an energy operator found producing assets, established ministry relationships, and sovereign receivables consistent with sector norms. Prior transactions demonstrated negotiating discipline. Data room materials supported the growth thesis. Networks across petroleum ministry technical offices, joint venture structures, and state security institutions established what the deal documentation could not reveal. The target held assets across contested borders; its nationality was denied at the highest levels. Regional instability had become leverage: the more gas remained trapped elsewhere, the more the host country's transit infrastructure mattered. Host-government counterparties viewed the operator as cost-driven to the point of mistrust. It pressed for arrears while resisting the investment needed to unlock higher production. A request to merge concessions had stalled; the government saw fields warranting expansion, not consolidation. Repayment priority depended on factors nowhere formalised: perceived commitment, capital depth, relationships with security entities embedded throughout sector governance. Companies described as private were majority-owned by intelligence services, their boards chaired by former deputy directors. The acquirer revised its valuation and restructured risk allocation before committing capital.Read full mandate

A private credit investor preparing to co-lend alongside a foreign-owned bank in a frontier market required an assessment of the bank's standing, ownership, and conduct before committing. The bank was licensed and long established; its group published results; its principals had orthodox careers in international finance. Networks across former and serving staff of the bank, its competitors, and the public institutions that banked with it established what the licence and the accounts did not. The bank was among the smallest in the market and had not grown since a change of ownership; its group's strategy ran through small, lightly regulated jurisdictions. Ownership sat with a holding company in a third country, and no local record showed its beneficial owners. Politically exposed clients were dealt with at management's discretion, and an earlier internal control failure had cost the bank a chief executive and a share of its depositors. But the principals were trusted by the authorities, no investigation had ever touched the bank or them, and its one local investment, in telecommunications infrastructure, was sound and well regarded. The assessment placed the risk where it sat: in opacity and scale rather than in conduct.Read full mandate

A trading house evaluating supply relationships with exporters in a major origin market required assessment beyond shipping records. The exporters held licences and shipped consistent volumes. Coffee had never been primarily about coffee. In a forex-starved economy, export licences were permits to access dollars. The transparent exchange that once guaranteed supplier payments had been dismantled; what replaced it generated no data. Exporters faced no obligation to pay farmers; growers who extended credit killed themselves when payments never came. The market leader owed banks more than it held in assets; its rise had been engineered by the regional president as he reshaped the sector's ethnic composition. It had outgrown the institutions nominally regulating it. It honoured contracts with major buyers and defaulted on smaller counterparties without consequence. Others survived through military patronage; imperial-era dynasties found that relationships cultivated across three generations had inverted overnight. When private bank exposure grew untenable, a regional government bank absorbed the debt. The client recalibrated volume towards counterparties whose protection would outlast the current administration, and structured enforcement through relationships rather than hollowed-out legal frameworks.Read full mandate

A development finance institution with exposure to certified supply chains in a conflict-affected extraction zone faced questions on responsible sourcing. Portfolio holdings passed periodic audits. Armed groups controlled extraction sites, yet certification continued uninterrupted. The state's own enforcement commander acknowledged that all production qualified as conflict minerals and that international standards were no longer met. No suspension came. Permits arrived from provincial capitals without field verification. Inspectors received no salary and survived on payments from the trading houses they regulated: twenty dollars to look away. A regional executive reduced fraud penalties from full seizure to thirty per cent; with prices across the border running higher, smuggling became rational. No scales existed at customs; the declared tonnage was the tonnage. The insurgency operated customs that traders found more predictable; a neighbouring military secured corridors for a fee. Production crossed borders into transit-state statistics. The producing state stationed agents at a foreign port to verify that goods transiting the neighbour arrived. Sovereignty ended at the frontier. The client engaged investees on the exposures that certification had masked.Read full mandate

An oil services company considering market entry required an assessment of a logistics partner presented as a condition of access. The partner was registered; contracts with the national petroleum subsidiary existed. Operating in the oilfields required membership of the security apparatus; subcontracts were allocated to intelligence officials for reasons of trust and control. Outsiders were not permitted. The partner fronted for figures who could not be seen holding assets directly. It tracked production at sites controlled by the presidential family, recruited for the revenue authorities, and ensured proceeds reached the correct accounts. Ownership was layered through the presidential family. A family-controlled entity collected national taxes; the split favoured the family over the state. Ventures opened for specific purposes, then closed leaving no trace. Records did not survive the accountants who kept them. The sector had been absorbed into the presidential household. Operating with integrity was not possible. The client withdrew.Read full mandate

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

A foreign ministry assessing humanitarian logistics through a conflict corridor required understanding beyond coordination frameworks. Designated crossings existed; implementing partners were established. Three border tribes had maintained passages inside family homes, connecting to relatives across the line. Goods moved through these tunnels until military operations filled them and consolidated transit through a single operator with presidential ties. Passage now required substantial payments to brokers on the other side. Drivers remained sealed in their cabs during unloading, their cargo transferred to hands they could not see. Aid entered formal channels but resurfaced on parallel markets at four times its original price, and fuel at fifteen. When banking collapsed, mobile networks became remittance infrastructure; commissions reached thirty per cent. Families who had lost livelihoods formed armed groups along the main artery. Drones filmed the diversions; no intervention came. Inside the territory, the economy had regressed to subsistence forms: clay ovens, firewood markets, rubble excavated for reuse. Profits left. The assessment mapped which channels could deliver accountably and which existed only to extract.Read full mandate

A consumer goods company evaluating market entry required an assessment of a local partner presented as able to secure licensing and distribution. The candidate held ministry relationships and a dedicated distribution vehicle. A transition had occurred. The candidate's relationships traced to figures who fell during it; he had departed and had not returned. His distribution vehicle had been cut from the approved list after a consolidation that reduced authorised distributors to single figures. The operational partnerships in this market were different: families who operated through proxies, and whose position traced to the liberation struggle. When their foreign partner lost money for years, they stayed. When the president fell, they briefly departed; nothing happened. They returned. A raid on a distributor uncovered undocumented product and unexplained cash. The investigation spread nationwide and subordinates went to prison. The sector's gatekeeper, protected by military connections no transition had touched, remained. Below producer level, documentation ended. Distributors described monthly payments required to operate. The client assessed which relationships retained capacity, which channels permitted compliant operation, and what the market itself required.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

A foreign investor weighing partnership in a multi-billion-dollar railway-and-resources venture required diligence on its two principals. The structure was fronted by a financier from a major financial centre, who chaired the vehicle holding the ore the railway would evacuate. But the relationships that made it work belonged to his operating partner, a long-running intermediary across three decades of presidential circles. Networks across the national legislature, the relevant ministries, the presidential entourage, and the opposition documented what the public framing concealed. The operating partner carried a fraud conviction abroad, and had taken ministerial office chiefly for the immunity it conferred against extradition. His interest traced not to the railway but to the resource beneath it, and to a claim long advanced in private that the stated deposit sat above something more valuable. Sources converged across partisan lines: extractive intent, infrastructure as cover for a permit play, named gatekeepers across two ministries. The brief was a go/no-go. The investor did not proceed.Read full mandate

An international mining company evaluating expansion into gemstone-producing provinces required assessment beyond regulatory compliance. Prospecting permits had been secured; geological surveys confirmed reserves. Concessions granted in the capital reached provinces cut off from signal or consultation. Communities discovered decisions affecting their land when the equipment arrived. Traditional authorities held an effective veto despite having no role in official licensing. Artisanal miners worked concession areas on ancestral logic that formal boundaries neither addressed nor displaced. Security at existing operations had turned lethal: crops destroyed, transit blocked, peasants treated as trespassers on ancestral ground. International operators remained invisible in the communities where they extracted. A mandated profit-sharing arrangement, ten per cent of gross revenues for twenty-five years, had never reached the provinces it was meant to benefit. The assessment identified whose consent was required, which ancestral claims overlay each site, and the elders through whom the client could distinguish itself from those who had poisoned the ground.Read full mandate

A development finance institution evaluating participation in renewable infrastructure required an assessment of a developer active across multiple markets. Projects had been announced; formal procurement frameworks existed. In three jurisdictions, the same approach emerged. Access had been secured without competitive tender: terms of reference drafted to fit a predetermined winner, projects awarded as compensation for cancelled concessions, legislation amended to permit what existing law prohibited. Each award carried diplomatic freight, a gesture following investment disputes with a regional power, and each ran through pre-existing relationships: a sovereign fund chief who knew the developer from prior ministry roles, cabinet access facilitated through foreign embassies. The state counterparties were opaque, and in some cases barely solvent: one utility had gone unaudited for decades, another was the region's most indebted power company, its board filled with presidential relatives. Execution lagged everywhere. Projects were undersized, years passed between signature and construction, and technologies were promised that did not yet exist. Countries that had sought energy independence still imported power from their neighbours. The client restructured participation terms before committing.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 development lender considering electricity infrastructure required an assessment of where capital would actually flow. The utility published governance structures and procurement procedures. On paper, the board appointed leadership through competitive evaluation. In practice, the prime minister selected the CEO and the board confirmed. Ethnic affiliation at the top shaped appointments, contracts, and which territories received coverage. Purchases worth billions in local currency proceeded without documentation available even to auditors. The utility operated as a feudal landlord, collecting from tenants it did not serve. Half of all electricity purchased was lost before reaching consumers; no official had faced consequences for leaving half the country in darkness. One lender acknowledged reporting figures that did not reflect field conditions. The client committed to the structures that could deliver and the counterparts who retained capacity for accountability.Read full mandate

A development lender evaluating co-financing of hydropower infrastructure required an assessment of whether accountability mechanisms would function. The contractor held decades-long relationships with successive governments; projects were delivered. Procurement records showed formal tender processes. The contractor operated less as vendor than as co-sovereign: it prepared feasibility studies, proposed projects, then won tenders designed to exclude alternatives. When state delays caused losses, compensation flowed to the contractor; when contractor errors caused structural failure, no penalty applied. A tax evasion investigation had been dropped. The national audit office had been ordered to halt a performance audit; the state utility had not faced external audit for over a decade. Foreign government backing shielded the contractor from opposition. The client restructured terms around the accountability mechanisms that could function, and ring-fenced those that could not.Read full mandate

A multinational moving staff and cargo along two trade corridors, with fixed sites in the region they crossed, required a year of continuous monitoring. Official assessments graded one corridor secure, the other contested; peace talks had collapsed; a surrender programme was underway. Networks across the insurgency's commands, state security structures, customs posts, and communities along both corridors documented what the gradings could not. Control divided by surface rather than by front line: government forces held the towns and the asphalt; the countryside did not answer to them. Towns on one corridor fell for days at a time, more than ten times in the year; on the corridor graded secure, a mayor was ransomed. Customs withdrew rather than be attacked; unofficial checkpoints taxed what still moved; the army requisitioned trucks and conscripted from the roads. Abduction had a tariff, and factory managers were taken on a schedule, flagged from inside their own plants. The insurgency was two commands with separate treasuries of ransom, gold, and diaspora money, and the leadership that might negotiate could not bind the command that lived off the war. Surrender ran unit by unit, priced in houses and cash, and rarely held: amnesties withdrawn, the surrendered retrained for redeployment. The longest closures came not from the fighting but from a redrawn administrative boundary that set two armed communities against each other. Attacks clustered around holidays, troop rotations, and the hours after four o'clock. The client timed movements, shifted volume between corridors, and set site postures against the conditions the gradings did not describe.Read full mandate

A presidential directive, framed as a measure against deforestation and a push for domestic processing, banned unprocessed timber exports. A client with exposure to the sector needed to know whether the ban would hold. Ministry officers had recommended a narrow measure; what came from the executive was a blanket ban they had not proposed and did not support. It enriched a small group of processors with access to the president, some of them backed by senior military figures. They stood to corner raw-material supply once rivals were forced out and growers were left with timber they could not sell. Treated poles and kiln-dried timber, finished by the ministry's own standards, were reclassified as raw to starve a captive domestic market. The agencies meant to police the ban answered, through the security chain, to the interests it served. The revenue and trade arms resisted a measure that gutted their tax base. The ban was not environmental policy but market capture. And because the interests it served sat above the technical ministries, it would hold far longer than its stated rationale implied. The client repositioned on that basis, rather than on the directive's face.Read full mandate

An international institution conducting a compliance review of a telecommunications contractor required assessment of beneficial ownership and regulatory standing. The company was registered; institutional contracts were documented. The company was beneficially owned by a presidential relative, held through a nominal shareholder structure. It had operated without the licence its services required, obtaining one only after the inquiry began. Employees were seconded from state agencies, and the network infrastructure belonged to the state telecommunications operator. Financing derived from public funds channelled through related technology ventures, and government contracts won by connected entities funded the company's expansion. Strategic decisions sat with the presidential household; the relative approved operational matters only. The client renegotiated terms before renewal.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

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