The Middlemen
March 2016. The Age in Australia and The Huffington Post publish the Unaoil Files: hundreds of thousands of leaked internal emails from a Monaco-based oil-services company run by the Ahsani family — father Ata, sons Saman and Cyrus. The emails document, in barely coded language, more than a decade of systematic bribery: blue-chip corporations in the US, UK, Australia, and Europe paying a family-run firm to win oil contracts in Iraq, Libya, and Kazakhstan, and that firm paying off the officials who made the decisions.
What followed was one of the most consequential international corruption investigations of the 2020s. Saman Ahsani pleaded guilty in the United States in 2019 and cooperated. In London, the Serious Fraud Office convicted British executives at Southwark Crown Court in 2022. Rolls-Royce paid £671 million in a Deferred Prosecution Agreement. SBM Offshore settled for $238 million.
Then, in 2021, it emerged that a senior SFO investigator had run an unauthorised back-channel with defence counsel. The case survived — but only just.
Ellis and Maren on how corporations outsource their bribery to middlemen, and why the executives who went to prison were the ones too small to pay their way out.
Also in the network
More from Courtside Europe
Eighty-Two Seconds
At quarter to four on a Saturday afternoon in Brussels, a man walked into the Jewish Museum of Belgium carrying two bags. Eighty-two seconds later, four people were dead.
The Christmas Raid
Christmas night, 25 December 2017. Just before four in the morning, thirty-two officers from Georgia's State Security Service raid a house in the village of Duisi, in the Pankisi Gorge near the Russian border. Their target is a nineteen-year-old named Temirlan Machalikashvili, suspected of supporting an ISIS-linked cell. Two officers enter his bedroom. They shoot him in the head at close range.
The Liquidator
Amsterdam, 26 February 2024. A Dutch court, sitting inside a purpose-built fortified bunker under a prison — the Extra Secure Court, known as De Bunker — hands down a life sentence against Ridouan Taghi. The verdict closes the Marengo trial, the largest criminal prosecution in Dutch history. Over five years, it examined billions of euros in cocaine trafficking, a witness protection regime that collapsed around the people it was meant to shield, and the assassinations of lawyer Derk Wiersum and investigative journalist Peter R. de Vries.
New episodes every week
Get notified when new cases drop across the network.