Independence
Who pays for this, and what they get for it.
Document-bound investigation is slow and expensive, and the entities best able to fund it are the ones we should never take money from. This page sets out where our funding comes from, what it buys, and the things it explicitly cannot buy.
- Policy
- FUN-01
- Advertising
- None accepted
- Profiled-entity funding
- Prohibited
- Disclosure
- Annual, itemised
Section 01
The rule that comes before the funding model.
No money from an entity in the archive, from anyone acting on its behalf, or from anyone whose interest in a subject we could not disclose without embarrassment. This is checked before a contribution is accepted, not after.
No advertising
We sell no placements, sponsored posts, native units or newsletter slots. There is no commercial inventory on the platform for anyone to buy.
No payment from subjects
We accept nothing from profiled entities, their owners, officers, counsel, agencies or reputation-management contractors, in any form and at any time.
No paid removals
Records are never taken down, delisted, softened or deprioritised in exchange for money. Every attempt to buy one is logged and reported in aggregate.
No coverage influence
Contributors, members and institutional subscribers do not select subjects, see drafts, or receive advance notice of publication. Nor do they get a veto after it.
Section 02
Ways to fund the work
Support arrives in four forms. The first three are open to anyone; the fourth carries additional checks because the sums are larger and the reputational risk runs both ways.
| Form | Who it suits | Disclosure | Editorial access |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reader membership | Individuals who want the archive to keep existing and want the research tooling that comes with it | Aggregate only; members are never named | None |
| One-off contribution | Readers who would rather give once than subscribe | Aggregate, unless above the named-donor threshold | None |
| Institutional subscription | Compliance functions, law firms, universities, newsrooms and public bodies with multiple users | Institution named in the annual report | None |
| Investigative fund grant | Foundations and philanthropic funders supporting specific classes of investigation | Funder, amount, term and any conditions published in full | None |
Section 03
What the money actually goes on.
Investigative cost is unglamorous and mostly invisible in the finished record. It is worth naming, because it explains why a single dossier can take months.
Records access
Court filing fees, registry extracts, certified copies, company searches, land and vessel records, and the per-document charges that jurisdictions apply to anyone who asks.
Translation and regional expertise
Filings in the language they were made in, read by someone who understands the legal system that produced them rather than by machine translation.
Verification and fact-checking
The second editor who argues the opposite case, the adverse review that kills claims late, and the re-verification cycle that keeps old records from quietly rotting.
Legal review
Pre-publication review on contentious records, and the capacity to defend a correct story when a subject would rather litigate than reply.
Source protection
Encrypted submission infrastructure, hardware for handling untrusted material, and security work that has no visible output until the day it matters.
Permanence
Hosting, versioning and preservation of records that are supposed to still resolve and still be citable long after the events that prompted them.
Section 04
Funding we refuse.
Declined funding is reported alongside accepted funding, because a publication that only discloses what it took is telling half the story.
We decline contributions from any entity in the archive and from anyone acting for one. We decline funding conditioned on subject selection, on advance sight of material, on the framing of findings, or on the outcome of a correction.
We decline funding where the source cannot be established to our satisfaction, where accepting it would create an undisclosable conflict, and where the funder is itself the likely subject of foreseeable reporting. Where a declined offer is material, it appears in the annual report with the reason for refusal.
Where a conflict emerges after money has been accepted — a donor becomes a subject, or a subscriber turns out to be connected to one — the conflict is entered in the public register, the affected coverage is reassigned, and the funding is returned where returning it is the only clean remedy.
Research tools for the people who check the record for a living.
Membership pays for the archive and unlocks the Evidence Scanner — saved searches, alerts when a record you follow changes, and exports that keep every citation attached.