YunoBlog

Author: tio

  • Migrants and refugees in Libya subjected to ‘systematic’ abuse: UN report

    Migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers in Libya are enduring ruthless and systematic human rights violations, including killings, torture, sexual violence and trafficking, according to a new report published today by the UN human rights office, OHCHR.   

  • Anti-Corruption Probe Launched Into Romanian Business Registry’s Failed IT System

    Romanian anti-corruption prosecutors are investigating a 38 million-euro ($44.6 million) IT project at the National Trade Registry Office (ONRC) after the system caused major service disruptions and exposed personal data, according to reporting by OCCRP member center Public Record.

    The platform, launched in summer 2024, blocked more than 130,000 business registrations for weeks, disrupting company formation nationwide and frustrating users. 

    The registry, overseen by the Ministry of Justice, manages official records for more than 1.7 million people and companies.

    Draft audits by the National Court of Auditors and the Justice Ministry found serious problems. Auditors said the system was launched before proper testing, that the agency never received its source code, and that security and functionality checks were incomplete. Investigators estimated losses of more than 12 million lei ($2.7 million) because penalties were not enforced for delays and faulty testing.

    Former registry director Valentina Burdescu, who was dismissed in 2024 after the audit but still works at the agency, is also under scrutiny. Her husband holds a senior post there, raising concerns about conflicts of interest. Auditors also said that financial benefits were improperly granted.

    The main IT contract went to Vodafone Romania, which subcontracted software development to Total Soft SA, a company owned through firms in Cyprus and Turkey. Auditors said Total Soft was supposed to provide the source code but it is unclear whether the registry ever received it, meaning the agency may be unable to fix or review the system independently.

    Public Record spoke with IT manager Vlad Herescu, who said a contractor may withhold source code to keep a client dependent for maintenance, conceal incomplete functionality, or mask poor-quality programming that could pose security risks. 

    Vodafone Romania said it had “fulfilled all contractual obligations” and that implementation was coordinated by the registry’s management, but did not address questions about the code or alleged vulnerabilities, while Total Soft referred inquiries back to Vodafone.

    The failed IT system also triggered a data breach affecting over 3,000 individuals. The Ministry of Justice reported that the platform was unstable and insufficiently tested at the time of launch. ONRC acknowledged initial disruptions but attributed them to an unusually high number of requests.

    Auditors concluded that the project was signed off nine months before it was launched, creating legal, financial, and operational risks.The case remains under investigation, and Public Record reported that the Court of Accounts’ audit is ongoing. ONRC did not respond to the Public Record’s requests for comment.

  • Boy first in UK to have pioneering leg-lengthening surgery

    Alfie Phillips, 9, had the pioneering treatment at Liverpool’s Alder Hey Children’s Hospital.

  • The American Media Polycrisis: Cascading Layers of Capture

    From the recent gutting of the Washington Post to the rightward lurch of CBS, the sheer proliferation and variation of media failures and attacks on the press during Trump 2.0 are difficult to grasp. Regulatory bodies have become political weapons. Major news organizations have complied and retreated. Media ownership has consolidated in the hands of a few feckless billionaires. Taken together…

    Source

  • Pluralistic: What’s a “gig work minimum wage” (17 Feb 2026)

    Today’s links


    A figure in a rich robe sitting atop a throne, surrounded by bags of money; his face is masked by a robber's balaclava. Beneath the throne stream densely packed cars on a nighttime freeway. Behind him is a car's broken windscreen with an Uber logo in one corner.

    What’s a “gig work minimum wage” (permalink)

    “Minimum wage” is one of those odd concepts that seems to have an intuitive definition, but the harder you think about it, the more complicated it gets. For example, if you want to work, but can’t find a job, then the minimum wage you’ll get is zero:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20200625043843/https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-06-24/forget-ubi-says-an-economist-its-time-for-universal-basic-jobs

    That’s why politicians like Avi Lewis (who is running for leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party) has call for a jobs guarantee: a government guarantee of a good job at a socially inclusive wage for everyone who wants one:

    https://lewisforleader.ca/ideas/dignified-work-full-plan

    (Disclosure: I have advised the Lewis campaign on technical issues and I have endorsed his candidacy.)

    If that sounds Utopian or Communist to you (or both), consider this: it was the American jobs guarantee that delivered the America’s system of national parks, among many other achievements:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps

    The idea of a wage for everyone who wants a job is just one interesting question raised by the concept of a “minimum wage.” Even when we’re talking about people who have wages, the idea of a “minimum wage” is anything but straightforward.

    Take gig workers: the rise of Uber and its successors created an ever-expanding class of workers who are misclassified as independent contractors by employers, seeking to evade unionization, benefits and liability. It’s a weird kind of “independent contractor” who gets punished for saying no to lowball offers, has to decorate their personal clothes and/or cars in their “client’s” livery, and who has every movement scripted by an app controlled by their “client”:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/02/upward-redistribution/

    The pretext that a worker is actually a standalone small business confers another great advantage on their employers: it’s a great boon to any boss who wants to steal their worker’s wages. I’m not talking about stealing tips here (though gig-work platforms do steal tips, like crazy):

    https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-announces–5-million-settlement–reinstatement-of-

    I’m talking about how gig-work platforms define their workers’ wages in the first place. This is a very salient definition in public policy debates. Gig platforms facing regulation or investigation routinely claim that their workers are paid sky-high wages. During the debate over California’s Prop 22 (in which Uber and Lyft spent more than $225m to formalize worker misclassification), gig companies agreed to all kinds of reasonable-sounding wage guarantees:

    https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/14/final_ver2/#prop-22

    When Toronto was grappling with the brutal effect that gig-work taxis have on the city’s world-beatingly bad traffic, Uber promised to pay its drivers “120% of the minimum wage,” which would come out to $21.12 per hour. However, the real wage Uber was proposing to pay its drivers came out to about $2.50 per hour:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

    How to explain the difference? Well, Uber – and its gig-work competitors – only pay drivers while they have a passenger – or an item – in the car. Drivers are not paid for the time they spend waiting for a job or the time they spend getting to the job. This is the majority of time that a gig driver spends working for the platform, and by excluding the majority of time a driver is on the clock, the company can claim to pay a generous wage while actually paying peanuts.

    Now, at this phase, you may be thinking that this is only fair, or at least traditional. Livery cab drivers don’t get paid unless they have a fare in the cab, right?

    That’s true, but livery cab drivers have lots of ways to influence that number. They can shrewdly choose a good spot to cruise. They can give their cellphone numbers to riders they’ve established a rapport with in order to win advance bookings. In small towns with just a few drivers – or in cities where drivers are in a co-op – they can spend some of their earnings to advertise the taxi company. Livery drivers can offer discounts to riders going a long way. It’s a tough job, but it’s one in which workers have some agency.

    Contrast that with driving for Uber: Uber decides which drivers get to even see a job. Uber decides how to market its services. Uber gets to set fares, on a per-passenger basis, meaning that it might choose to scare some passengers off of a few of their rides with high prices, in a bid to psychologically nudge that passenger into accepting higher fares overall.

    At the same time, Uber is reliant on a minimum pool of drivers cruising the streets, on the clock but off the payroll. If riders had to wait 45 minutes to get an Uber, they’d make other arrangements. If it happened too often, they’d delete the app. So Uber can’t survive without those cruising, unpaid drivers, who provide the capacity that make the company commercially viable.

    What’s more, livery cab drivers aren’t the only comparators for gig-work platforms. Many gig workers deliver food, meaning that we should compare them to, say, pizza delivery drivers. These drivers aren’t just paid when they have a pizza in the car and they’re driving to a customer’s home. They’re paid from the moment they clock onto their shift to the moment they clock off (plus tips).

    Now, obviously, this is more expensive for employers, but the Uber Eats arrangement – in which drivers are only paid when they’ve got a pizza in the car and they’re en route to a customer – doesn’t eliminate that expense. When a gig delivery company takes away the pay that drivers used to get while waiting for a pizza, they’re shifting this expense from employers to workers:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/billionaireism/#surveillance-infantalism

    The fact that Uber can manipulate the concept of a minimum wage in order to claim to pay $21.12/hour to drivers who are making $2.50 per hour creates all kinds of policy distortions.

    Take Seattle: in 2024, the city implemented a program called “PayUp” that sets a “minimum wage” for drivers, but it’s not a real minimum wage. It’s a minimum payment for every ride or delivery.

    A new National Bureau of Economic Research paper analyzes the program and concludes that it hasn’t increased drivers’ pay at all:

    https://www.nber.org/papers/w34545

    To which we might say, “Duh.” Cranking up the sum paid for a small fraction of the work you do for a company will have very little impact on the overall wage you receive from the company.

    However, there is an interesting wrinkle in this paper’s conclusions. Drivers aren’t earning less under this system, either. So they’re getting paid more for every delivery, but they’re not adding more deliveries to their day. In other words, they’re doing less work and then clocking off:

    https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/02/minimum-wages-for-gig-work-cant-work.html

    A neoclassical economist (someone who has experienced a specific form of neurological injury that makes you incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power) would say that this means that the drivers only desire to earn the sums they were earning before the “minimum wage” and so the program hasn’t made a difference to their lives.

    But anyone else can look at this situation and understand that drivers only did this shitty job out of desperation. They had a sum they needed to get every month in order to pay the rent or the grocery bill. They have lots of needs besides those that they would like to fulfill, but not under the shitty gig-work app conditions. The only reason they tolerate a shitty app as their shitty boss at all is that they are desperate, and that desperation gives gig companies power over their workers.

    In other words, Seattle’s PayUp “minimum wage” has shifted some of the expense associated with operating a gig platform from workers back onto their bosses. With fewer drivers available on the app, waiting times for customers will necessarily go up. Some of those customers will take the bus, or get a livery cab, or defrost a pizza, or walk to the corner cafe. For the gig platforms to win those customers back, they will have to reduce waiting times, and the most reliable way to do that is to increase the wages paid to their workers.

    So PayUp isn’t a wash – it has changed the distributional outcome of the gig-work economy in Seattle. Drivers have clawed back a surplus – time they can spend doing more productive or pleasant things than cruising and waiting for a booking – from their bosses, who now must face lower profits, either from a loss of business from impatient customers, or from a higher wage they must pay to get those wait-times down again.

    But if you want to really move the needle on gig workers’ wages, the answer is simple: pay workers for all the hours they put in for their bosses, not just the ones where bosses decide they deserve to get paid for.

    (Image: Tobias “ToMar” Maier, CC BY-SA 3.0; Jon Feinstein, CC BY 2.0; modified)

    Hey look at this (permalink)


    A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

    Object permanence (permalink)

    #20yrsago HOWTO resist warrantless searches at Best Buy https://www.die.net/musings/bestbuy/

    #20yrsago RIAA using kids’ private info to attack their mother https://web.archive.org/web/20060223111437/http://p2pnet.net/story/7942

    #20yrsago Sony BMG demotes CEO for deploying DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060219233817/http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060210/germany_sony_bmg_ceo.html?.v=7

    #20yrsago Sistine Chapel recreated through 10-year cross-stitch project https://web.archive.org/web/20060214195146/http://www.austinstitchers.org/Show06/images/sistine2.jpg

    #15yrsago Selling cookies like a crack dealer, by dangling a string out your kitchen window https://laughingsquid.com/cookies-sold-by-string-dangling-from-san-francisco-apartment-window/

    #15yrsago Midwestern Tahrir: Workers refuse to leave Wisconsin capital over Tea Party labor law https://www.theawl.com/2011/02/wisconsin-demonstrates-against-scott-walkers-war-on-unions/

    #10yrsago Back-room revisions to TPP sneakily criminalize fansubbing & other copyright grey zones https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/sneaky-change-tpp-drastically-extends-criminal-penalties

    #10yrsago Russian Central Bank shutting down banks that staged fake cyberattacks to rip off depositors https://web.archive.org/web/20160220100817/http://www.scmagazine.com/russian-bank-licences-revoked-for-using-hackers-to-withdraw-funds/article/474477/

    #10yrsago Stop paying your student loans and debt collectors can send US Marshals to arrest you https://web.archive.org/web/20201026202024/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/02/us-marshals-forcibly-collecting-student-debt.html?mid=twitter-share-di

    #5yrsago Reverse centaurs and the failure of AI https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur

    #1yrago Business school professors trained an AI to judge workers’ personalities based on their faces https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine

    Upcoming appearances (permalink)

    A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


    A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

    Recent appearances (permalink)


    A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

    Latest books (permalink)


    A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

    Upcoming books (permalink)

    • “The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

    • “Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It” (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

    • “The Post-American Internet,” a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

    • “Unauthorized Bread”: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

    • “The Memex Method,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


    Colophon (permalink)

    Today’s top sources:

    Currently writing: “The Post-American Internet,” a sequel to “Enshittification,” about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1148 words today, 30940 total)

    • “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

    • “The Post-American Internet,” a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

    • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

    This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

    Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

    How to get Pluralistic:

    Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

    Pluralistic.net

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    https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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    https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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    https://doctorow.medium.com/

    Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

    https://twitter.com/doctorow

    Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

    https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

    “When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla” -Joey “Accordion Guy” DeVilla

    READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (“BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

    ISSN: 3066-764X

  • MD Enshittification

    Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. As some of you may be aware, I was an Infectious Disease (ID) physician for almost 40 years, retiring 3 years ago. My practice was almost entirely concerned with taking care of patients in several acute care hospitals. So […]

    The post MD Enshittification first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

  • Together with CMB Monaco, we’re accelerating progress in children’s cancer research

  • Are We Allowed to Criticise Mental Health Professionals?

    Are We Allowed to Criticise Mental Health Professionals?

    Editor’s note: this blog is co-published with Mad in America

    Are We Allowed to Criticise Mental Health Professionals?

    In my book Fragile Minds, I wrote about my recent experiences as a student mental health nurse in England. I wrote about real incidents and real things that staff said and did, which I scrawled down in disbelief while training.

    Since its publication, I am beyond grateful for the survivors and staff who have contacted me or written in support of the experiences I needed to make public, though the book has also been called a ‘furious attack’ on psychiatry that doesn’t ‘ring true’. I have been labelled as having a ‘saviour complex’ and as being ‘grandiose’ for asking questions about the treatment I witnessed. It has been claimed that I must be writing these things for my own gain, or that I must be a scientologist, or that I’m not knowledgeable enough to have an opinion on issues that are ‘far too complex’ for people like me to understand.

    Publicly criticising psychiatry and our treatment of mental ill health can feel terrifying; it fuels vehement responses which cloud our ability to hear each other and drives us to lash out. It threatens our understanding of ourselves, and our relationship with the world, and highlights our ability to repress and ignore the things in society that are too painful to confront.

    So despite having no public profile, I was genuinely frightened of the backlash I would receive. I wondered: if I somehow managed to portray an equal balance of ‘good and bad’ care experiences, would the undesirable truth of the shocking and at times cruel treatment of service users that I witnessed could be digested and believed more readily?

    Can we, in fact, continue to champion our free health care system, which I am extremely grateful for, whilst also calling out its abuses both on a systemic and—the really tough one—individual level?

    Yet, this desire for a balanced depiction felt fraudulent. The reality was, much to my surprise and disappointment, that I hadn’t witnessed much inspiring or even reassuring care during my two years on mental health wards and in community teams. What I had actually witnessed was overwhelmingly and starkly not good enough.

    Stories of good or even excellent care by medical staff, including mental health staff, are of course dominant in our media. The narrative that we are all immensely empathetic, selfless and dedicated despite the challenges feeds into a national pride that I have also felt enveloped by.

    I know from both my training as a mental health nurse, and later as a psychotherapist, that we are largely encouraged not to engage with or question other practitioners’ approaches. I’ve been told to ‘ask fewer questions’ about staff, to avoid putting across concerns and instead ‘try and see the best’ in them. The same with therapy training, where we are encouraged to generally assume that if there is a complaint from a client, or that they stop coming to us, or claim it wasn’t helpful or even harmful, we largely see the client’s response as something to do with them and their difficulties or ‘illness’, rather than with ourselves. I think this is a very worrying and even dangerous culture.

    So, when are we allowed to critique and potentially criticise mental health staff?

    We know that giving humans power often leads to abuse. When journalists do uncover abuses on psychiatric wards, we as a society seem to be willing to accept it as long as it is in the past, or, if it is within institutions that are painted as an ‘exception to the rule’. Likewise, the ‘bad apple’ staff members within a barrel full of virtuous ones.

    We also relish books by medical professionals who write about how they are understandably also struggling within the system, mostly due to the long hours, lack of funding and support, or their own mental health. But they are stories about how caring they and all the other staff are, how almost super-human their unending kindness is, despite all the odds.

    This is a very understandable narrative, and there are staff like this, I’ve met and worked with some of them. And we as a society want these stories; they fit with the narrative we desperately need when we are at our lowest and seeking support. We also want these stories as staff; it helps us feel better about ourselves while doing a job that is incredibly hard and largely poorly paid and exhausting.

    Questioning ourselves as staff or calling out poor care should not be seen as an ‘attack’ on a medical system. It should be an essential part of our love and respect for it, our desire to make it and ourselves better at what we are trying to do.

    While on nursing placements and then again while trying to write it all down, I attempted to make sense of why some staff had lost their empathy or dissociated. Why some were even rude or cruel or abusive.

    I wanted to dissect the stark divide of patients versus staff, and why nurses huddled in offices and avoided patient contact.

    As a student nurse, I know that I occupied a unique position within the psychiatric maze. My time there was finite. I had less paperwork, less pressure and responsibility. I wasn’t seen as the jailer, so I could observe. I had more time to talk, I could listen and absorb, read through years of notes, compare assessments, look for inconsistencies. I was both powerless and powerful.

    I know that it’s very different to whistle-blow when you are fully imbedded, when your family depends on your income, or when you’ve been working within a flawed system so long that your brain has moved past fight or flight and into dissociation.

    I saw first-hand that when despondency grows, it’s easier for us staff to numb ourselves, to hide amid banality and follow orders, than it is to challenge anything.

    Of course, with some staff it was easier to see what had happened to bring this dissociation and hopelessness on, than with others.

    Some staff appeared to have been devastated too many times by the poor outcomes of their treatment or the suicides of their patients to keep attempting to care for new patients.

    Others seemed to have been drained of empathy by the long days and relentless emotional toll of working with people in distress and not having been trained in how to really help them, or been emotionally supported to do so.

    Others still, by the orders to restrain or forcibly medicate over and over, or the doctrine of psychiatry itself which encourages us to ‘other’ the patients experiences from ourselves.

    There were also staff who seemed to have shifted their focus to protecting and empathising with other staff who they saw as being under attack from the interminable workforce shortages and unsafe demands, leaving them with little time or consideration for their patients.

    Yet more challenging, there were the staff members whose behaviour was difficult to understand. The staff who seemed to enjoy provoking patients into behaviours they were then punished for. Who told me they enjoyed the ‘action’ on wards, describing how it was a ‘rush’ for them to wrestle people to the floor or to inject them. Staff who seemed to hate their job and therefore the patients who embodied it. There were also staff who just flat-out lacked the skills I assumed were vital to working in mental health: patience, thoughtfulness, curiosity.

    It’s odd to see how readily we accept and even crave these characters in our films or books, but don’t want to believe that they exist within our real staff. Why is this?

    Of course, some of the backlash I’ve received has also come from service users who are protective of a system they feel has helped them. I can understand this. Though I question whether they are the minority, the minority among the many, many others who feel harmed. And it is the grateful service users who shout the loudest, who are given the biggest coverage in the media, whose stories we hear most.

    But at what cost do people have their good experiences? At what cost to all those who are silenced? To those who are shouted down as ‘anti-psychiatry’, shamed as conspiracy theorists, or are simply derided and told they are mad?

    When I started recording the worrying incidents I was witnessing, I was advised that my complaints would go nowhere and make it difficult for me to pass the course. So, I thought, what can we do when we’re unable to complain? When we can no longer explain?

    We can document. We can record as an act of evidence, as the basis for examination. We can attempt to capture the disorder of the whole so we can tease it apart, see its makings, and empower people to act. At least, that is what I’ve tried to do.

    I can only hope that Fragile Minds adds to the canon of survivor and activist literature in a way that helps people with similar experiences to speak up and be believed, both the survivors of psychiatric treatment and the staff who resist the pressure to conform.

    ****

    Mad in the UK hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

     

    The post Are We Allowed to Criticise Mental Health Professionals? appeared first on Mad in the UK.

  • Housing Cost: One in Seven Municipalities in Europe Unaffordable for Nurses

    Data analysis by CORRECTIV.Europe reveals: In these European locations, even a mid-level salary like a nurse’s is not enough to afford a small apartment.

  • Bank Documents Expose Scale of Secret Investments in Adani Group by Adani Family Associates

    Speaking privately with their bankers in February 2023, two associates of India’s Adani family confirmed that they held billions of dollars worth of stock in their conglomerate, Adani Group, through several hedge funds.

    Their admission, found in banking documents obtained by OCCRP, had a direct bearing on a scandal that was roiling the country. Just weeks earlier, American short seller Hindenburg Research had published an explosive report claiming that the Adani Group’s decade-long stock rally had been improperly driven by insiders through “brazen” manipulation.

    The affair made headlines across the world, in part because of the Adani Group’s widely perceived closeness to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. But after plummeting for a time, Adani’s stock recovered. The company issued a lengthy response denying all wrongdoing and decrying the report as an “attack on India.” And after a lengthy investigation, the country’s market regulator, SEBI, released two orders that found no violations in two aspects of the case, essentially ruling in favor of the Adani Group. No findings from its many other strands of investigation have ever been publicly aired.

    In the meantime, OCCRP and its reporting partners, the Financial Times and the Guardian, had revealed the names of two men who had spent years secretly trading Adani stock: Nasser Ali Shaban Ahli, a citizen of the United Arab Emirates, and Chang Chung-Ling, a Taiwanese citizen. Both men’s ties to the Adani family have been widely reported over the years, and both held positions in affiliated companies. The Adani Group again denied all allegations of impropriety, pursuing journalists in court and accusing them of representing “Soros-funded interests.”

    But now, internal documents from REYL Intesa Sanpaolo, a Swiss banking group headquartered in Geneva, reveal that Ahli and Chang’s investments in the Adani Group were much larger and more recent than was publicly known. While previous reporting revealed investments in the hundreds of millions between 2013 and 2018, the documents show they held about $3 billion in Adani stock through several hedge funds as recently as 2023 through accounts with Reyl Finance (MEA) Ltd., a Dubai-based subsidiary of REYL Intesa Sanpaolo.

    According to an internal report, Ahli and Chang confirmed this to their bank in writing, explaining that they had made these investments because they had personal and professional relationships with members of the Adani family and trusted their business acumen. In their statement to the bank, Ahli and Chang denied the allegations made by Hindenburg Research.

    The internal report also refers to inquiries about Ahli and Chang that the bank received from Swiss authorities. According to an August 2024 court ruling, prosecutors in the country were conducting a criminal investigation into Chang, suspecting him of acting as a “front man” for Adani Group investments, and froze over $310 million in assets. No charges have been brought. Asked about the status of the case, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office did not comment on Chang’s identity, but confirmed that a criminal investigation into money laundering and forgery of documents was underway. The bank did not respond to requests for further detail. The Adani Group has denied any involvement.

    The Swiss case, which closely tracks OCCRP’s previous reporting on the affair, is just one of the legal challenges the Adani Group has faced in recent years. In November 2024, U.S. federal prosecutors indicted the group’s founder Gautam Adani and his nephew for allegedly promising to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to Indian officials. A spokesman for the Eastern District of New York declined a request to comment on the status of the case. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a parallel civil complaint, which is ongoing. The group has called the accusations “baseless” and said it would pursue “all possible legal recourse.”

    In response to requests for comment, an Adani Group spokesperson wrote that any alleged “front men” for the Adani family are in fact “public shareholders.”

    “Under Indian law, a listed company neither controls nor directs who purchases publicly traded shares, nor does it have visibility into or responsibility for the source of funds of public shareholders beyond disclosures mandated by regulators,” the spokesperson wrote. “Any suggestion that promoter shareholding has been misstated or concealed is incorrect and contrary to disclosures made in accordance with applicable law.”

    The allegations found in the Hindenburg Report “have been adequately addressed by us and already examined at the highest levels of India’s regulatory and judicial framework, including the Supreme Court of India,” the spokesperson wrote. “The Adani portfolio of companies remain fully compliant with all laws and disclosure requirements across jurisdictions and continues to have complete faith in due process and the rule of law.”

    Ahli and Chang did not respond to requests for comment. In a short statement, a representative of Intesa Sanpaolo wrote that the bank “is not in a position to comment, as any disclosure is not permitted by law in Italy, the United Arab Emirates and Switzerland.”

    Billions invested through the British Virgin Islands

    The new revelations about Ahli and Chang appear in documents that detail their bank’s response to the Hindenburg Research report and ensuing scandal.

    According to these documents, after becoming aware of the allegations, the Italy-based Fideuram Intesa Sanpaolo Private Banking carried out an internal investigation into whether anyone connected to the Adani Group held any accounts with its private banking units.

    That investigation identified three relevant accounts, holding just over $3 billion in assets, at Reyl MEA, a Dubai subsidiary of the Swiss REYL Intesa Sanpaolo:

    • Nasser Ali Shaban Ahli held $2.02 billion through his BVI-based company, Gulf Asia Trade & Investment Ltd. Almost the entire amount was invested in hedge funds which had seen “significant increases in value over the last 3 years” and were “likely” invested in Adani Group companies.

    • Chang Chung-Ling held $1.02 billion through his BVI-based company, Lingo Investment Ltd. Almost the entire amount was invested in the same hedge funds, again with the note that they were “probably being invested in Adani Group companies.”

    • Vinod Adani, the elder brother of the Adani family, held $6.5 million through his UAE-registered company, Kommerce Trade & Services. Most of this was invested in a pharmaceutical company, though investigators noted some loan-related transactions “of a not particularly significant amount” between his company and Chang’s. Adani did not respond to requests for comment.

    Afterwards, Intesa Sanpaolo’s Chief Audit Officer and anti-financial-crime team requested that Ahli and Chang be called in for a meeting to explain their investments and their stance on the Hindenburg Research allegations.

    At that meeting, held in February 2023 with the CEO and a board member of Reyl MEA, both men signed a written statement confirming that the accounts were theirs and stating that they had made their investments in Adani stock because they had personal and business relationships with the family and trusted their business acumen. They denied any wrongdoing and promised to diversify their holdings “in the short term.”

    The bank also took additional measures, blocking any transactions on their accounts without specific authorization from an anti-money laundering officer. 

    It did not respond to reporters’ questions about its client relationship with Chang and Ahli.

    Swiss Investigations 

    The documents obtained by reporters also add new details to what is known about Swiss law enforcement attention to Ahli and Chang.

    According to the internal report from Fideuram Intesa Sanpaolo Private Banking, half-a-year before the Hindenburg report was published, Swiss “judicial authorities” sent “specific information requests” to REYL Intesa Sanpaolo about accounts held by Ahli and Chang. Subsequently, the bank submitted suspicious transaction reports to the Swiss Financial Intelligence Unit relating to both men, as well as Vinod Adani. The relevant accounts were closed at the end of December 2022 due to a lack of activity, and they are not the same accounts later found to hold the $3 billion.

    The Swiss information requests came as the authorities were looking into Chang for “suspicion of money laundering and forgery of documents” in an investigation that has been ongoing since 2021, according to an August 2024 decision by the Swiss Federal Criminal Court. (As reported at the time by Gotham City and the Financial Times, though Chang’s name does not appear in the decision, he can be identified by the information provided.)

    In that investigation, which was begun by prosecutors in Geneva but later taken over by the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, Chang is suspected of being a “front man” for the Adani group as part of a scheme to enable insiders to own a larger share of its stock than is permitted by law — exactly as he was described in previous reporting by OCCRP and the Financial Times. In connection with the case, Swiss prosecutors have frozen $311 million held by Chang in five bank accounts. 

    In the August 2024 decision, the Swiss Federal Criminal Court rejected an appeal by Chang’s company — the very same Lingo Investment Ltd that held his $1 billion — to unfreeze the money. 

    “The prosecuting authority must have time to conduct its investigation,” the court ruled. “It should be noted that the appellant is clearly unable to provide [prosecutors] with the explanations — in the form of supporting documents — which it should be able to provide in order to dispel the doubts legitimately raised.”

    Asked about the status of the case, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office did not comment on Chang’s identity, but confirmed that a criminal investigation into money laundering and forgery of documents was underway.