Gareth Vaughan

So it does raise the question of why is someone doing this?

It's slower and it's more expensive to do it this way.

than it would be to just use your credit card or go through a local bank.

So, I mean, at the time, he hadn't been convicted of anything, but subsequently he was convicted in the Comex tax fraud scandal in Europe, and he's now in jail in Luxembourg.

We obviously spent a lot of time looking at the documentation, checking it out, making sure that it was real and that it was viable.

And I'll give you an example of how thorough it was.

So just a few days before we were due to publish the story, the key OCCRP fact-checker who'd been working on the story said,

had sort of told us that with Richard Whittam, so he doesn't feature prominently in the first story.

There's just a little bit about him.

But obviously we talk about how he was in Changi Prison in Singapore and we have all sorts of court documents from Singapore relating to him, you know, his court case in Singapore.

But none of them specifically said he had been in Changi Prison.

Even the sentencing submissions we had

And so she was saying, well, you know, we're going to have to say, you know, he says he was changing president.

And I was just like, oh, my God, no, I don't want to do this.

I want to really nail this.

So basically I talked with one of the OCCRP editors who's based in Sydney, and I said, look, you know, can we get someone in Singapore just to help us?

Because as an outsider, media outsider, trying to get official information out of Singapore is really difficult.

So he said, can we get someone in Singapore to help with this?

So he said, yeah, look, see if Richard will sign, you know, a letter giving you permission to access his court records.

So I did and he did.