Barely one year after its debut as a business-investigation-based newsroom, BUSINESS LEAKS has been invited by the UK-based financial crime platform Themis to speak at its March 2023 roundtable. Themis, an anti-financial crime specialist firm, carries out research about a range of topics related to financial crime, analyzing both geographical and thematic risks.
In an email sent to Emmanuel Mayah, Executive Director of the International Centre for Development Reporting (ICDR), publishers of BUSINESS LEAKS, Nadia O’Shaughnessy, Themis’ Head of Research said: “Over the past year, we have partnered with Jersey Finance to organize a series of roundtable discussions about financial crime risks in specific jurisdictions. Our sessions to date have covered South Africa, Kenya, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria forms the focus of our next roundtable, planned for late November. Given your extensive experience and local expertise on financial crime matters in Nigeria, we would like to invite you to join this panel as a speaker.”
O’Shaughnessy further said that the event for March “is scheduled for Thursday 9th March “and invitations will be extended to senior representatives of firms across Jersey’s financial services sector with a business interest in Nigeria. The event has also been endorsed by the Jersey government and regulator, and the Jersey government is sending a senior representative to also join the panel.”
BUSINESS LEAKS is an investigative series conceived and supported under the Collaborative Media Engagement for Development Inclusivity and Accountability Project of the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ) with funding from the MacArthur Foundation.
The Collaborative Media project work through 26 sub-grantees, purposefully selected based on their focus areas, geographical locations and media types, to strengthen media independence and presence, especially at state and local government levels and the private sector, in a bid to improve public awareness and the ecosystem for transparency, accountability and good governance.
Themis, headquartered in Castle House, Guildford, United Kingdom has as its goal to reduce the global impacts of financial crime. It says: “Financial crime is a very real and evolving problem. It has been described as “a cancer on our society” and “an issue of international security.” Not only is the scale of illicit activity in the trillions of £s, but the impact on all of our businesses, the economy and society is profound.”
Since its debut 2022, BUSINESS LEAKS has carried out about 40 full-length investigations covering diverse sub-sectors in the private sector and government regulatory agencies under good governance.
Emmanuel Mayah said the invitation from Themis is a recognition of “a-pin-in-a-haystack niche journalism that pivoted under the Collaborative Media Engagement for Development Inclusivity and Accountability Project.”
Mayah added that he looked forward to leading his newsroom to leveraging on Themis system which can identify people who are on international sanctions international lists, have political exposure and influence, by accessing more than 505 million data points to perform checks related to illicit financial flows, trade malpractices and beneficial ownership.
