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Hello John,
Until a few months ago, 71-year-old British accountant Wendy Conroy looked like an improbable success in the world of Central Asian mining. Her company Lemixton Solutions, registered in East London, had won contracts worth more than $22 million from a major state enterprise in Uzbekistan to supply it with goods like steel pipes and aluminum sheets. But something was odd: Lemixton has no website, just one employee, and no identifiable Uzbek office. And since 2021, the company has consistently filed dormant accounts — a status reserved for firms that have no significant financial transactions. In fact, of course, Ms. Conroy had nothing to do with this business. Her closest link to it is that her son was the founder of the registration agent that managed its paperwork. She was just a proxy. That became clear when reporters contacted Ms. Conroy for comment. In a matter of weeks, a flurry of updated filings changed the persons “with significant control” listed for the company: First to a prominent Uzbek ping-pong official, then to a Colombian man. |
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| Both had their respective tenures backdated to 2018. The new filings also reveal that the firm’s ownership involves a trust arrangement: The mysterious Colombian man may also not be its ultimate beneficiary. The story shows that — for all the reforms that the British corporate registry Companies House has undergone in recent years — almost total opacity is still possible. Those reforms are real. In 2023, a major piece of legislation, the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act, promised to turn Companies House from a passive collector of information into an active gatekeeper. Company officials now face mandatory ID verification, and the agency has new powers to check and remove bad information. But this story reveals the numerous remaining gaps. Trusts have emerged as a weak point in previous reporting, and while new ID requirements may help ensure real people are registered as “persons with significant control,” these people don’t necessarily represent a company’s true owners — as the case of Wendy Conroy shows. The downstream effect is that, halfway across the world, tens of millions of dollars from the Uzbek state budget flowed to a British firm whose ultimate owners are completely hidden from the public. This leaves space for anyone who can afford to hire professional company administrators to take advantage. Read the full story → |
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| The analysis above is a free preview of our upcoming OCCRP PRO membership, a new offering tailored to professionals who rely on our investigations for work in finance, law, compliance, risk management, policy, and related fields. Interested to learn more? Let us know and tell us what you need! Your feedback will directly shape the services we build. |
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| | | Amphetamines In The Attic: A Dutch City’s Battle Against Clandestine Labs |
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| The day before the police raid on Eetcafé Oppe Platz pub in September 2024, the mayor’s office in the southeast Netherlands town of Echt received a complaint that the popular venue had taken on a pungent chemical stench. Chemicals were seeping through the floorboards and down the exterior walls, but the cafe remained open for business: unbeknownst to staff and patrons, a full-blown synthetic drug lab upstairs was grappling with a dangerous chemical spill. When police launched their raid, an unknown substance burned at the soles of their shoes, according to mayor Jos Hessels. “It was like a scene from a bad film,” he told OCCRP. “It was dripping through the ceiling.” Sandwiched between the borders of Germany and Belgium, Echt was historically a hub for smugglers. Today, the post-industrial town sits at the nexus of a multi-billion-euro illegal narcotics industry, with two of Europe’s busiest ports, Antwerp and Rotterdam just a couple of hours’ drive away. Read the full story → |
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| | | | When Dubai's Crown Prince reached out to a successful Romanian businesswoman on LinkedIn, she thought she was being recruited for a humanitarian investment. Instead, she became the victim of an elaborate romance scam that would cost her over $2.5 million. |
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| | | Firm Donated £200,000 to Reform UK, Owed Even More In Tax |
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| British right wing party Reform UK, led by Member of Parliament Nigel Farage, received a series of significant financial boosts last summer from an interior design firm, Interior Architecture Landscape Limited. The donations totaled around 200,000 British pounds (over $250,000). Meanwhile, corporate records indicate that the company was at risk of being shut down by the tax authority over an unpaid tax debt of more than 218,000 pounds ($292,000). Reporters were unable to identify any active staff, ongoing design projects, or place of business beyond a registered address at an accounting firm. The director and sole shareholder of the firm, John Simpson, indicated that the company’s fortunes have turned around. He told OCCRP the firm is “currently engaged in construction and contract management activities with an aggregate contract value in excess of £15 million [$20 million], which has generated sufficient resources to enable the company to make political donations.” He declined to “publicly disclose client identities or specific properties,” and added that the political donations were “in compliance with UK electoral law.” Read the full story → |
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| | Montenegrin Crime Boss Vanishes After Sentencing |
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| The president of Montenegro has accused the government of systemic failure after Miloš Medenica, the son of a former Supreme Court president, vanished despite being under house arrest following a major organised crime conviction. On Wednesday, Medenica was sentenced to 10 years and two months in prison. Police were unable to locate him, prompting public outrage and questions about the authorities’ handling of the case. “The fact that police are searching for Miloš Medenica, even though he was under house arrest, is an unprecedented scandal and a collapse of an unserious system,” President Jakov Milatović said yesterday. “If the state loses a convicted organized crime figure on the day of sentencing, the prime minister has no control over his own government.” His mother, former Supreme Court head Vesna Medenica, was also sentenced to 10 years in prison for multiple counts of illegal influence while in office. Both she and her son were fined 50,000 euros ($59,800). Read the full story → |
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| | Secretive Firms From U.K. to Singapore Win $200M in Tenders From Uzbek State Giant |
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| Two U.K. firms, along with a larger circle of companies stretching from Singapore to the South Caucasus, have been awarded more than $200 million in contracts tied to an Uzbek state-owned mining enterprise since 2022. However, the companies examined by OCCRP and Finance Uncovered as part of a new investigation all share a troubling lack of opacity around their ultimate beneficial ownership. In one case, a U.K.-registered company won at least 56 Almalyk Mining-Metallurgical Complex (AMMC) tenders worth a total of $22.53 million — however, the company’s official filings show it has just one employee, no website, and no identifiable physical office in Uzbekistan, and has filed dormant accounts since 2021. AMMC produces copper, silver, gold, and other metals for domestic and global markets, and accounts for around nine percent of Uzbekistan’s total tax revenues. Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has flagged the entity for potential listing on a foreign stock exchange, and it is earmarked for privatization — part of the government’s pledge to boost transparency, including in public procurement. Read the full story → |
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| | | Episode 2: Carmelo, Where Are You? |
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| With reporting from Miami to Madrid, Venezuelan journalist Laura Weffer unpacks the mechanics of the corrupt loan schemes that allowed elites to siphon off $1.2 billion from Venezuela’s state oil company Listen to the original version in Spanish here, or an English-language AI translation here → |
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| | | | Investigative Journalists: Turn your reporting into an interactive game! Submissions are open for the 2nd Floodlight Gaming Investigative Journalism Game Jam. We want to help turn your investigative journalism into interactive, in-browser games developed in collaboration with independent game creators. Submit your story by February 15. We’ll announce selected stories on March 15, share them with game developers, and choose the winning games at the Indigo Festival in Rotterdam on June 2 and 3. |
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| | Next-IJ Investigative Training Are you a mid-career investigative journalist based in Europe? This opportunity is for you! Next-IJ is now accepting applications for the March 2026 edition of our training. Last year, over 100 journalists from across Europe joined our training sessions to learn, exchange ideas, and strengthen their skills. This March, we’re opening the doors again for a new cohort to take part in this transformative experience. Join us on March 20, 2026, for a free, full-day intensive online training session tailored for European mid-career journalists tackling complex, cross-border investigations. Delivered by leading investigative experts from OCCRP and Transcrime (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore), the training focuses on real-world methods, tools, and cross-border strategies used in today’s investigations.
Learn more about the program, and be sure to apply by March 13 → |
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| P.S. Thanks for reading! Got feedback? Simply reply to this email. |
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