To report on Europe is to report on the world.
One investigation documents how oil production linked to European companies is accelerating the drying of Iraq’s ancient marshlands. Another traces luxury car leather to cattle ranching on Indigenous land in Paraguay. A third reveals trafficked workers in Myanmar forced to run online scams aimed at Europeans.
Each of these investigations began with a European lead. Each quickly crossed borders, requiring reporters to work thousands of kilometres from Europe itself.
IJ4EU has a proud history of supporting watchdog journalism that transcends European frontiers. But in the 2024–25 funding cycle, as many as one in two IJ4EU-backed investigations relied on collaborations that stretched well beyond the continent.
A selection of recently published stories illustrates the trend.
Surveillance Secrets
A leaked deep-web dataset of more than a million phone-tracking operations tied to Indonesian company First Wap upended assumptions about who gets tracked and why. Reporters identified 1,500 targets across 160 countries — from VIPs and tech founders to journalists and ordinary citizens — and even caught executives on hidden camera describing how to track activists and skirt sanctions. It’s a global surveillance market with unmistakable European storylines.
The Great Firewall Export
A cross-border team parsed a leak from China’s Geedge Networks, linking its censorship/surveillance tech to Myanmar, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan and Pakistan — and to Europe via licence management software from France’s Thales and a German server used to distribute installs. The work shows how European infrastructure can quietly underwrite digital repression abroad.
The Steel Route
Reporters traced steel giant ArcelorMittal’s supply chain from Liberia and Mexico to Spain and France, documenting environmental and social costs felt all along the route — a sobering counterpoint to “green steel” marketing. It’s a single industrial story that spans three continents and multiple languages.
Making Iraq Dry
This cross-border probe connects European oil majors’ operations in Iraq to accelerating water scarcity and damage inside the Hawizeh Marshes, a UNESCO site. It links European corporate decisions to environmental collapse far from Brussels — and to the lives of marshland communities.
Dubai ‘Wallet’
This investigation tracked how a little-known Emirati businessman came to control around 150 properties in Lithuania while linked to Viktor Chevtsov, a Belarusian regime insider considered one of President Lukashenko’s personal “wallets”. Reporters uncovered corporate ties stretching from Belarus to Venezuela, highlighting how politically connected wealth can enter the EU through real estate even under the pressure of sanctions.
Tales from Madagascar
An examination of an EU-Madagascar fisheries deal asks who really benefits when European tuna fleets deploy highly destructive Fishing Aggregating Devices in one of the world’s most fragile tuna regions — and whether promised funds ever reach local fishers. Europe’s “sustainable” access meets Malagasy coastal realities.
Cyber-Scam Slavery
Journalists followed the money and the people behind vast online frauds to compounds on the Myanmar-Thailand border, where trafficked workers are forced to run crypto and romance scams targeting victims in Europe. Cybercrime and modern slavery converge — and Europe is part of both ends of the chain.
‘Children of Silence’
A tri-continental team in Chile, France and Italy documented a decades-long system of irregular adoptions — not just during the Pinochet era but right up to recent years — enabled by networks of religious figures, social workers and officials. Europe isn’t a bystander here; it’s a destination.
Repsol: The Corporate Spill
From Lima’s coastline to Spanish boardrooms, this investigation shows how a 2022 oil spill by a European energy giant devastated Peruvian communities — and how marketing clean-ups outpaced environmental ones. It’s corporate accountability work that must cross oceans to make sense.
Driving Deforestation
From Paraguay’s Chaco region to Italian tanneries and European car brands, this project links leather supply chains to deforestation and threats to indigenous Ayoreo Totobiegosode territories — a reminder that European luxury can have distant ecological footprints.
Pirate Equity
This project followed how European and American pension funds ended up indirectly financing Russian oil and gas assets via opaque private equity structures, despite sanctions and divestment pledges. The investigation raises questions about transparency and the difficulty of tracing who ultimately benefits from global financial flows.
EU Funding for China Inc.
By mining procurement data, reporters showed how EU-backed projects — including in Georgia and Serbia — still channel significant contracts to Chinese state-linked firms, despite policy rhetoric. It’s a financial story that runs through Luxembourg spreadsheets to Belt-and-Road job sites.
Europe’s Mercenary Recruitment Network
A freelancer trio revealed how poorly trained European contractors — from supermarket guards to truck drivers — were recruited and deployed to Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where their actions breached international law and aided the fall of the city to the rebel M23 group. The finances, the politics, the casualties: all cross-border.
European Mercenaries in Africa
Zooming out, a separate team mapped European private military companies operating in the DRC, including entities tied to France, Germany, Belgium and Romania. From drone warfare to procurement advice, it exposes a European “grey zone” alternative to the Russian Wagner Group.
World of Pain
With partners across Europe, Brazil and the United States, this project tracked how the Sackler-owned Mundipharma continued making hundreds of millions abroad as opioid marketing practices migrated beyond the U.S. The public-health risks — and the profits — are unmistakably global.
Visit our projects section to see more IJ4EU-supported investigations.