We are excited to announce that the search engine for investigating suspicious oligarchs, politicians, or companies FOLLOW THE MONEY now works on the BridgeGap website. Follow the Money is a search engine enabled by the Youcontrol, a #BridgeGap partner organization, on top of their YC World pooled database.
The search engine enables investigating beneficial ownership (who really owns a company) and undue corrupt influence (links between public authority holders, directly or through their proxies and businesses) by uncovering business links between companies and individuals, searching mostly in registers of commerce from the European Union, United Kingdom, Ukraine, Russia, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Belarus.
Track relevant connections between subjects using either names of individuals or businesses
To use the search engine, you need to have login credentials that you can obtain by writing here.
This is what the distinguished, BBC cited, criminologist Kristian Lasslett from Ulster University had to say about Follow the Money:
“The tool can be very useful indeed, and quite novel in some ways. The visualisation of company data allows rapid exploration of networks, in a couple of minutes you can quickly unfold a whole range of interconnected entities in quite an intuitive manner. There is a lot of nice in-built features, such as fuzzy logic, so it detects if there are relevant targets that might be one letter different from your search term (so catching common variations in names).
The platform also has a lot of other handy features. It tells you numerically how many other entities each individual is tied to, so you can see one person is tied to 6 entities and another 152 – so you know who are generic nominees and who may be more intimately tied to the target. And you can do additional searches and add them to the network diagram and you can even add entities manually.
So in this sense it is quite unique, and sits very snugly besides OCCRP’s ALEPH and Seamless Horizons (C4ADS). Aleph does not have the same corporate intelligence capabilities, but the breadth of data, including leaks that you can access on Aleph makes it indispensable too.
If they manage to build even more jurisdictions in, this will become a premier tool“
BridgeGap enables access to researchers (which will undergo a vetting process) to the Follow the Money universe.
Our highly motivated, high-tech Ukrainian colleagues at Youcontrol, together with our developer Alex Popescu from ERCAS and Transparency International Integrity Hub will continue to expand coverage of Follow the Money with new jurisdictions.
Get out there and catch some oligarchs or corrupt politicians today. Don’t start with Vladimir Putin. Professor Mungiu-Pippidi’s students have done this first, and he does not hold assets under his name in any of these jurisdictions. Try his business circles. Try Austrians or Germans, who are so vocally pro-Russia. I bet you would have surprises. See more on our brief tutorial here. Good luck and good hunt!
– Follow the Money: https://corruptiondata.eu/follow-the-money/
To vet yourself and get login credentials and free access, cite #BridgeGap: https://id.youcontrol.world/registration
– More on Kristian Laslett – https://www.ulster.ac.uk/staff/kak-lasslett