For the people of Lebanon, 2020 was a year of almost unmitigated disaster. In early August, Beirut was rocked by a devastating port explosion. Meanwhile, a historic currency collapse was driving millions into poverty and sparking violent street protests.

But the year also brought a rare moment of accountability.

Much of the popular anger at the economic crisis was aimed at one man: central bank governor Riad Salame. Once hailed as an economic genius, he was now blamed for policies that had led to huge government debt and capital flight. Spray-painted stencils of his face, adorned with devil horns, appeared across the capital. 

Under mounting scrutiny, Salame launched a probe into the vast sums of money moved abroad by the country’s elites. Then, just days after the port blast, reporters from OCCRP and its Lebanese partner Daraj published a bombshell investigation that exposed Salame’s own foreign wealth. His offshore companies, they found, had secretly invested nearly $100 million into an international property empire.

The revelations had global consequences. The United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada sanctioned Salame for corruption. France, Germany, and Switzerland opened money laundering investigations. Eventually, Salame was indicted at home on charges of embezzlement, forgery, and illicit enrichment. (He told reporters he had broken no laws, having amassed “significant private wealth” before joining the central bank.)

This historic reckoning would have been impossible if not for an obscure reform, adopted the previous year by a government agency on a different continent. 

As it turns out, a key set of Salame’s assets were held by three companies incorporated in Luxembourg. His connection to them remained a secret for years. But in 2019, in response to growing pressure to meet EU transparency requirements, Luxembourg upgraded the transparency of its business registry. For the first time, any interested member of the public could look up the “ultimate beneficial owners” (UBOs) of any company registered there.

That was “essential” to the Salame investigation, according to OCCRP journalist Tom Stocks, a reporter on the project.

“Salame was never mentioned anywhere as a director or official on any of the Luxembourg companies we were looking into,” Stocks said. “Then we went to check who was the UBO, and it was him.”

This story is just one example of how beneficial ownership data enables journalists to strike decisive blows in the public interest. It also illustrates how corporate ownership transparency, even in a country as small as Luxembourg, can have global significance.

But the progress represented by Luxembourg’s reforms has been reversed. In 2022, public access to its beneficial ownership registry was slammed shut. Journalists must now submit their national IDs, press credentials, proofs of residence, and a relevant body of work just to gain the opportunity to make an inquiry. It’s not clear whether a non-European — say, a journalist from Lebanon — could penetrate the system at all.

And it’s not just Luxembourg. In a 2022 ruling, the European Union’s highest court found that public access to beneficial ownership information infringed on the right to privacy. Countries across the continent responded by shutting down or severely restricting access to their registries. In the years since, journalists have been left to navigate a fractured and exasperating bureaucratic landscape.

Revised EU law now dictates that anyone who can demonstrate a “legitimate interest” in a company’s ownership, including journalists, should be able to get the data they need. But with each member state enforcing its own set of often opaque rules, the reality is an arduous slog. In many countries, reporters must justify their interest on a case-by-case basis, battling different application portals, obscure bureaucratic inboxes, nationality requirements, and burdensome demands for justification, such as Ireland requiring evidence of criminal proceedings against the requested company, or the Czech Republic demanding a judicial order.

In theory, this mess should soon be cleaned up. By July, the European Commission is requiring EU member states to adopt a common set of standards that clarify what exactly counts as “legitimate interest,” and to grant journalists, civil society organizations, and other groups generalized access that doesn’t require repeated permission-seeking.

But with just months to go, the Commission has yet to even issue the guidance for how the new system is supposed to work. 

“Until the European Commission issues a standard template on how legitimate interest access should work in practice, the implementation deadline will likely be delayed,” said Hugh Jorgensen, Programme Lead on Corrupt Money Flows at Transparency International, an international watchdog group that has long advocated for greater corporate transparency. 

“Without a common EU approach, there is a risk that requests for access will end up being processed on a case-by-case basis, effectively shutting journalists and civil society out due to slow, burdensome, and inconsistent national rules.”

A Long Road

The push for UBO transparency has been several decades in the making. 

The end of the Cold War in the late 1980s ushered in a new, globalized era. Financial systems became more tightly intertwined, with money moving across borders in ever-more sophisticated ways. Digitization and fintech products offered new opportunities for transferring, obscuring, and repackaging wealth.

In this new landscape, the question of corporate transparency took on greater urgency. In 2003, the Financial Action Task Force, an influential body that sets global anti-money laundering standards, called for financial institutions to identify the real humans behind companies for the first time. And at a 2013 summit in Northern Ireland, G8 leaders made a landmark declaration demanding that companies must “know who really owns them.”

These recommendations were largely addressed to banks, financial regulators, and law enforcers. But for the public, the turning point was the 2016 publication of the Panama Papers, a groundbreaking journalistic investigation into secretive corporate ownership. Armed with leaked data from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm that specialized in offshore services, journalists revealed how politicians, oligarchs, and criminals from around the world used anonymous shell companies to evade taxes and launder money.

In the aftermath of that publication, and with growing urgency after each fresh disclosure, transparency advocates pressed their case. It shouldn’t take a fortuitous leak of secret documents, they argued, for the world’s wealthiest and most powerful to be held to account. Once obscure, the issue of beneficial ownership transparency became impossible to ignore.

Capitalizing on the global outrage, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron hosted the first-ever global anti-corruption summit in London’s opulent Lancaster House in May 2016. Stronger rules on beneficial ownership reporting were at the top of the agenda, and a number of countries committed to creating public registers for the first time.

The United Kingdom, whose real estate has long been a magnet for laundering illicit funds, led the way. That summer, it became the first G20 country to launch a public register of “Persons with Significant Control” (PSC) — the British term of art for beneficial ownership. A separate Register of Overseas Entities (ROE), which opened in 2022, collects information about the ultimate owners of foreign companies that own land in the United Kingdom. 

Both of these registers are fully public and accessible through the simple-to-use Companies House website. Now free to trawl through the U.K.’s corporate data, journalists have done so to great advantage, uncovering billions of pounds in suspicious wealth from corrupt schemes that stretch across the globe.

Just last month, OCCRP journalists found a sanctioned member of an alleged Cambodian criminal syndicate who had purchased a dozen homes through a U.K. company, with a key piece of evidence coming from the PSC registry.

The other registry helps in more complex cases. In 2021, the Pandora Papers leak enabled OCCRP reporters to find $700 million worth of London real estate tied to the family of Ilham Aliyev, the authoritarian ruler of Azerbaijan. At the time, the story was only possible because of leaked secret documents that revealed beneficial owners.

But after the ROE was opened the following year, reporters were able to re-check the ownership of those properties through foreign companies, this time from an official source. They found that some of the properties were still owned by Aliyev’s daughters, while others listed new beneficial owners, suggesting they had been sold.

Even this world-class system has its limits. In the Aliyev case, the ownership of some of the properties that reporters had previously traced to the family remained impenetrable because they were held by trusts, which are not subject to the same requirements — a loophole advocates are pushing to close.

In another case, journalists dug into two U.K. crypto exchanges processing billions of dollars in transactions and accused by the U.S. Treasury of moving money for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, only to find that the person listed in the register as their ultimate owner did not appear to exist. It was only after OCCRP’s reporting that Companies House removed the name from its records. Such cases have turned the need to verify registry data into another lane of advocacy.

The EU Steps Backwards

Though it is no longer subject to EU rules after Brexit, the United Kingdom has made steady progress. The U.S., meanwhile, has continued to lag behind, with UBO data still largely inaccessible to the public. And in the European Union, recent developments show how quickly hard-won gains can be reversed.

In 2018, the European Commission’s fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive mandated that all EU member states make their beneficial ownership registries publicly accessible. Most did so — until the 2022 decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union wiped out this progress.

To comply with the court decision, many of the countries that once had public registries restricted access to cases where the applicant can prove a “legitimate interest” to know the information.

This regime, which now pertains in a majority of EU member states, is extremely haphazard in practice. A researcher engaged by OCCRP to test whether access was possible found a wide variety of practices. Many countries still require individual applications via email. Some have digital registries that don’t fully function. The request forms and requirements to document “legitimate interest” are all different. 

Some systems, in France for instance, were internally inconsistent, initially requiring press accreditation but eventually relaxing this requirement. Other countries, such as Hungary, were slow to respond, with a researcher waiting a month to receive a response to a simple inquiry about how to make the application. Ireland’s process was among the worst, with the relevant information potentially held at any of three agencies. And in Germany, those requesting information about a company are asked to provide documentary evidence linking it to its suspected beneficial owner, effectively requiring disclosure of journalistic findings before they’ve even been obtained.

Today, at least three European UBO registries are fully closed to journalists: Greece, Slovakia, and Cyprus. But even the latter, a tiny country of just over 1 million, has international significance: Data from a major investigative project, Cyprus Confidential, showed how Russian oligarchs used the country’s financial sector to hide wealth from sanctions and oversight.

And in practice, even seven registries on the continent that remain fully “public” are not always available to everyone. In some countries, like Croatia or Portugal, national IDs are needed in order to log in, excluding foreign journalists.

Even in this environment, journalists have found ways to press on. Over the last few years, the rise of cross-border collaborations, a strong public appetite for “Panama Papers”-style exposés, and multiple leaks of UBO data have shown what journalists can achieve with this information.

Where such reporting is possible, it has changed the fates of nations. In Lithuania, the UBO registry is not public, but journalists can gain access by citing the public interest. Reporters from OCCRP’s local partner Siena did so last year after receiving a tip that they should look into a company tied to then-prime minister Gintautas Paluckas.

It was access he and his colleagues had to “fight for,” says Sarunas Cernauskas, Siena’s editor-in-chief. But the result was the biggest story of his career. Looking up the company in the UBO registry, he and his colleagues found that its majority owner was Paluckas’ sister-in-law. As it turns out, her company had received EU funds to build a boat charging station far from any waterway — and had spent most of the money buying batteries from another entity owned by Paluckas. The story was followed by a police raid — and, hours later, the prime minister’s resignation. (Paluckas has denied wrongdoing and said he was not involved in the management of Garnis, the company that supplied the equipment.)

Modern investigative journalism of the kind required to expose a central bank governor’s secret wealth or hold a prime minister accountable is expensive and laborious. When corporate structures cross oceans, journalists need partners across the world and months of work to piece them together. The people they investigate, meanwhile, often have vastly greater legal and financial resources.

With many major investigative projects, like Cyprus Confidential, coming to light only because of leaked documents, it’s easy to imagine what would be possible with more accessible data.

“When countries like Cyprus withhold UBO data from the public, hiding economic and political connections, it creates a great opportunity for corruption and crime to flourish,” said Esra Aygin, co-managing editor of the Cyprus Investigative Reporting Network (CIReN). “It’s especially shameful when the data exists, and there is EU law requiring journalistic access, but investigative reporting is being impeded through implementation delays and bureaucratic obstruction.”

With reporting from Daraj.

It was green, or perhaps aquamarine; I can’t quite remember now. A Hungarian sleeping mat for camping, made of synthetic material. Back in the 1980s, when I took it on trips to Poland’s Tatra mountains, it felt like it had come from another world. 

In the Polish People’s Republic, a country that no longer exists, but in which I grew up, “things from Hungary” seemed different and better. At a time when Polish communism was rotting and falling apart, Budapest was our Paris, a little portal through which real chewing gum found its way into our greyish world. Hungary was part of the Soviet bloc, just like we were. But we envied them.

Our friendship with the Hungarians — strong then, and no less strong today — is perhaps a legacy of the defunct Austro-Hungarian monarchy, that strange 19th-century empire of which we were both a part. Or perhaps it’s our common Central European melancholy.  

But while 40 years ago we looked up to the Hungarians, today what we have for them is a valuable, hard-won lesson — and a warning. As a Polish journalist, I avidly followed last weekend’s events, when Hungary’s quasi-authoritarian government, in power for 16 years, was voted out. But I also can’t forget that we in Poland went through the same thing just a few years ago. The next steps our friends take won’t be easy.

I was no longer a teenage camper when I first found myself in Budapest in early 2011. It wasn’t quite Paris anymore, but it still held on to its faded charm. Just as I arrived, a new era was beginning. Something strange was in the air. A few months earlier, my Hungarian colleague, Attila Mong, was sacked from the public broadcaster Radio Kossuth because he had marked a repressive new media law with a minute of on-air silence. That was the start of the Fidesz party’s rule.

After his 2010 election, the first thing Viktor Orbán set about tackling was the media, reorganizing it in the style of Vladimir Putin. Fear of censorship and dismissal began to spread among ordinary journalists. Fidesz’s onetime treasurer turned pro-Orbán oligarch, Lajos Simicska, was given the task of raising funds to build a new media ecosystem. 

Funded by pro-Orbán business interests, and supported by state advertising money, this “new media” sowed moral panic, stoked a fear of refugees, and demonized the “evil” European Union. Small investigative journalism organizations, like Atlatszo, Direkt36, Telex, or 444.hu, were the last bastions of free speech, operating under constant government fire. 

Next came the judicial system. Fidesz swiftly curtailed the powers of Hungary’s Constitutional Court, replacing the old judges with its own political appointees. It changed the system of judicial oversight. It amended the constitution, then wrote a new one. Over 16 years of Fidesz rule, Hungary went from a liberal democracy to what political scientists call a hybrid system with authoritarian features.

In 2015, the same story began in Poland. The Law and Justice Party (PiS), elected with the goal of leading a conservative revolution, copied the methods of its Hungarian counterpart, even promising Poles it would build a “Budapest in Warsaw.” It pacified the media. It distorted the judiciary. Its leaders were so besotted with the Hungarian prime minister that, just like him, they used Israeli Pegasus spyware to eavesdrop on their opponents. In short, PiS followed Orbán’s path — albeit in a milder, weaker way.

One bitter lesson we learned from the Hungarian example is that it’s quite possible for the government of an EU state to dismantle democratic institutions — and meet only token resistance from Brussels. Our Constitutional Tribunal, public prosecutor’s office, police, and secret services became the tools of a single party. The public media constantly broadcast pro-government propaganda, inciting hatred against refugees and LGBTQ+ people, and claimed this was the “will of the people.” 

Poland began to fall in freedom of speech rankings, and “things brought over from Hungary” took on a very different meaning. A total ban on abortion sparked hundred-thousand-strong protests in 2020 — and the authorities simply ignored them. I remember that moment, so heavy and stifling that it was hard to breathe. Like their Hungarian peers, many young people chose to leave their home for Berlin or other places in western, more liberal Europe.

But somehow, despite furious propaganda and all manner of political dirty tricks, the Poles managed to remove their Fidesz clone from power in 2023. PiS decisively lost the parliamentary election and retreated to the opposition. Now it was the Hungarians who began to look at the Poles with a touch of envy.

Now, Poland’s eight-year experience of democratic backsliding — and what has followed since — may serve as a useful precedent for our Hungarian friends. As we learned, PiS left a staggering amount of traps and landmines for its successors — and many have proved impossible to defuse. Fidesz, which ruled for twice as long, has laid similar traps and mines in Hungary.

Following its election victory, Poland’s new Civic Coalition government promised to quickly restore the rule of law and implement a range of social demands. In practice, some of these promises remain unfulfilled or are being implemented much more slowly than voters had expected. This applies, for example, to the liberalization of abortion laws — the current regulations remain among the most restrictive in Europe, and changes have become bogged down in political and procedural disputes.

Most fundamental is the issue of weakened institutions. The Polish courts, for example, were so thoroughly undermined that to this day no one knows what to do with them. Countless judges were appointed in breach of constitutional requirements, but the process of removing them from office is still ongoing. Attempts to restore balance are fraught with the risk of repeating previous practices.

Disputes over the legitimacy of judges have contributed to an embarrassing state of chaos in the Constitutional Tribunal, Poland’s highest court. For months, it has been mired in political conflict and decision-making paralysis.

Meanwhile, Poland’s public media are controlled by the National Broadcasting Council, a constitutionally independent body whose employees are appointed to lengthy terms and can’t be easily removed. It’s staffed and led almost entirely by PiS members. Guess which media outlets it prefers to reprimand and punish.

Despite these frustrations, our more liberal, democratic Poland could serve as an example for Péter Magyar’s new Hungarian government. If the attempt to build a “Budapest in Warsaw” failed, perhaps a “Warsaw in Budapest” could emerge? After all, with his decisive electoral victory, Magyar holds more cards in Hungary than Donald Tusk did when he came to power in Poland. Above all, Magyar has the constitutional majority crucial for implementing changes. But a long and bumpy road lies ahead.

Among his tasks will be to get Hungary out from under the EU’s Article 7 procedure — the bloc’s so-called nuclear option which allows for the suspension of a member state’s rights if it seriously threatens the rule of law and democratic norms. Separately, and even more urgently for Budapest, rule-of-law disputes have left roughly 17 billion euros in EU funds frozen — an amount that represents nearly 10 percent of Hungary’s annual GDP. Magyar has promised to adopt a package of anti-corruption laws, and above all to restore the independence of the judiciary. That should help.

In the case of Poland, Tusk’s new government, which also inherited frozen EU funds, managed to unblock them relatively quickly because the rule-of-law issues were concentrated mainly in the judiciary and it signalled a credible intention to resolve them (though it has only partially succeeded). 

Hungary’s situation is more complex. Getting the EU money back will require not only a renewed judicial independence, but also anti-corruption reforms, guarantees of academic freedom and LGBTQ+ rights, and disputes involving EU asylum law.

Magyar’s first step, namely his commitment to join the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, is a wise and symbolically powerful move. It signals a break with Orbán’s system in the fight against corruption and should renew Brussels’ goodwill. But the full release of the frozen funds will require genuine legislative and institutional reforms on many fronts. Some additional gestures could unlock the first tranches within a few months. But meeting most of the conditions will take at least a year, as they require legislative changes.

Magyar’s party is not liberal “in the Brussels sense.” It voted alongside Fidesz on migration, has been cautious on supporting Ukraine, and opposed the EU’s 2024 migration-and-asylum overhaul. Magyar defeated Orbán because he promised Hungarians a continuation of center-right policies without Fidesz’s excesses: Without oligarchic networks encumbering the state, without pandering to Trump and Putin, and without unnecessary wars with Brussels, for which Hungary’s economy, deprived of EU funds, has paid the price.

If the Fidesz oligarchy can be dismantled and autonomy restored to universities and cultural institutions, Hungary will most likely return to the European mainstream, no longer playing the role of a Trojan horse for Donald Trump or Putin within the EU.

But what will become of the media, degraded and corrupted by the previous regime? Who will now be the “guardian of democracy”? Reporters Without Borders describes Hungary as a country with “media empire under the party’s command,” and has ranked the country 68th out of 180 in its press freedom index (down from 23rd place in 2010).

Magyar has announced that he will suspend news programs on state media until objective reporting can be ensured. He also promises to pass a new media law and establish a new media supervisory body. This is to be one of his cabinet’s first steps. He assures us that his future government will not interfere with journalists’ work.

My Hungarian friends — the fearless journalists I have come to know over the past two decades — will surely have many important and useful tips for their new prime minister. Let us hope he takes them on board, and that “things from Hungary” take on a new meaning once more.

For nearly 15 years, Ruslan Ivanytskyi has served as a judge in Ukraine, where until they got a raise in around 2018, judges made the equivalent of several hundred dollars a month. Yet his family controls a sprawling portfolio of luxury real estate and prime land that dwarfs their declared earnings, according to a new investigation by the Ukrainian news outlet hromadske.

Much of the property is registered to the judge’s 73-year-old mother, Hanna Ivanytska, a retired local official whose lifetime declared income amounts to roughly $300,000.

Her most notable recent acquisition is a 104-square-meter apartment in a luxury residential complex in central Kyiv, purchased in November 2023 on behalf of the judge’s niece, Anastasiia Ostrovska. 

While similar units in the building were selling for at least $400,000 at the time, official records show Ivanytska bought the apartment for roughly $95,000 — a fraction of its market value.

Real estate agent Oleksii Hnuchikh told reporters that the purchase price of $950 per square meter is highly unrealistic, not only for that specific complex but even for older buildings in the area, which he described as “one of the most expensive streets in Ukraine.”

The revelations touch on a persistent issue in Ukraine, where unexplained wealth among public officials and the judiciary has long been a hurdle in the country’s broader anti-corruption efforts.

During a 2018 judicial qualification review, Judge Ivanytskyi acknowledged that some of his properties had been transferred to his mother, who handled their use and arrangements with third parties. However, he was unable to clearly explain whether those arrangements generated rental income or if the properties were provided for free use.

One of the properties previously owned by the judge was linked to a 2013 criminal investigation into illegal gambling. At the time, law enforcement documented slot machines operating in a basement connected to his property. Judge Ivanytskyi claimed he had granted use of the space free of charge and denied any involvement in the gambling ring. Police told journalists that the case was closed in April 2014 without anyone being formally suspected of a crime.

Beyond the capital, the family holds significant assets in the western Ukrainian city of Mukachevo, including commercial properties and land. In 2018, Ivanytska acquired a half-hectare parcel near the city center. The land’s designated use was subsequently changed to allow for multi-apartment residential construction by a decision of the city council — where the judge’s sister, Olesia Ostrovska, serves as a lawmaker.

The family’s finances have recently drawn official scrutiny. In 2025, regional tax authorities placed some of Ivanytska’s assets under a tax lien due to outstanding debt, raising additional questions about the family’s cash flow.

The wealth also appears to extend to the next generation. The investigation highlighted the lifestyle of the judge’s 21-year-old niece Ostrovska, who drives luxury vehicles with an estimated combined market value of around $180,000. She also owns some of the land in Mukachevo where an apartment complex was built (with parts of it currently under construction) — plots she purchased when she was just 19.

Judge Ivanytskyi told hromadske reporters that he had not received any income from real estate since becoming a judge.

“I have not lived with my mother, have not shared a household, and have had no mutual rights or obligations with her since 2001. I have no information regarding my mother’s acquisition of a car or real estate,” Ivanytskyi said.

Across war-torn Sudan, women and girls “are telling a consistent story of continued experience of danger, and risks for gender-based violence” whether when fleeing to safety or arriving at displacement camps, a senior official with the UN reproductive and sexual health agency UNFPA said on Friday.

5.8 million Haitians, or roughly 52 per cent of the population, are facing crisis levels of food insecurity, or worse. Of those, more than 1.8 million are dealing with emergency levels, which means they are exhausting their last assets and unable to meet even basic food needs.

In 2025, nearly 900 Rohingya refugees were reported missing or dead in the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal, making it the deadliest year on record in South and Southeast Asia, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said on Friday.

The war in Gaza has inflicted a far higher toll on women and girls than in previous conflicts in the Palestinian enclave, with more than 38,000 killed by Israeli air bombardment and land military operations since Hamas-led terror attacks in Israel sparked the war in October 2023, UN Women said on Friday.