Virtual mining in Cameroon: corruption, failure and profits
In Cameroon, most mining project fail, yet some individuals make millions. This investigation into ‘virtual mining’ exposed a number of corrupt practices by officials, some of whom made millions from...
View ArticleA costly lunch with the president’s son
It’s rare to get a glimpse into how companies and corrupt officials negotiate bribery deals. Documents provided by one of the people involved in such a deal, enabled me to reconstruct the negotiation...
View ArticlePoverty on top of gold, the World Bank project in Liberia
The World Bank invested $19 millions in an industrial gold mine in Liberia, in the hope of contributing to development. But it only brought poverty and pollution. The shady history of the mine, which...
View ArticleQuebec’s real estate, new hotspot for the wealth of Africa’s rulers?
Politically-exposed Africans and their friends invested a total of $26 million in Québec’s real estate since 2000. We uncovered investments by a dozen individuals from Chad, Congo-Brazzaville,...
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The Mines Minister, his wife and the Australian company Sundance resources
(Published in French in Le Monde Afrique) In a Yaoundé notary’s office in 2007, a handful of people gathered to close a deal worth over 10 million euros. CamIron, a local company that held a valuable...
View ArticlePaul Biya, Cameroon’s Roaming President
Cameroonian president Paul Biya has long been known for his travels abroad for private business. With two Cameroonian journalists we calculated just how much time he had spent out of the country. Each...
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Burning Cameroon: Images you’re not meant to see
Since October 2017, over 180,000 people were displaced by the conflict between anglophone separatists and the Cameroonian army. Cameroon’s security forces have killed dozens of civilians, perhaps over...
View ArticleAnatomy of a Killing in Cameroon
A movie shot on a phone went viral last July. It shows two women, a little girl and a baby escorted by several soldiers. The soldiers smack a women in the face. They blindfold the women, and shoot all...
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The lost Ebola blood
Where are the samples extracted from patients during the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa? To investigate this, I did nearly a hundred freedom of information requests and spent a month in...
View ArticleEbola business in Congo
I looked at militarisation and mismanagement (‘Ebola Business’) in the Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of Congo through several articles. One investigation for The New Humanitarian revealed...
View ArticleIsraeli mercenaries in Cameroon
Over the past two decades, Israeli mercenaries have been training the BIR, an elite unit of the Cameroonian army. Their names were mostly kept secret. The BIR are the special forces of Cameroon,...
View ArticleDiversity in media outlets that report on Africa
International newsrooms that report on Africa are often full of white journalists (and I’m one of them). But just how white or how ethnically diverse are they? To get a better idea, I did a survey of...
View ArticleTracking surveillance planes and drones in Somalia
We used an antenna to track surveillance planes that were flying over Somalia, analysing massive amounts of data to find out a few planes flying in perfect circles. These planes provided intelligence...
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COVID quarantine? Not if you own a jet!
We investigated the French businessmen who flew from Paris to their beach homes on their private jets (French only). They broke the COVID quarantine rules that left everyone else stuck at home. I...
View ArticleFrontex complicit in illegal pushback of migrants
Migrants who attempt to cross the Aegean from Turkey to Greece, to seek refuge in Europe, know that the Greek coast guards often stop their boats, disable them by taking their fuel and then pull them...
View ArticleThe civilians killed by France’s operation Barkhane in the Sahel
We revealed that French soldiers of operation Barkhane killed at least 25 civilians in Mali while the official toll stands at 7. French troops have fought against jihadists in the Sahel since 2013....
View ArticleMoney laundering in French real estate
French real estate attracts dirty money from all over the world. By matching government datasets available online, our cross-border team of journalists uncovered nearly €750 million of purchases with...
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