The Secret Deals Behind the World's Largest Infrastructure Contracts

In the spring of 2023, a mid-level auditor at a regional development bank stumbled upon a discrepancy. A $340 million infrastructure contract awarded in West Africa had been routed through a holding company registered in the British Virgin Islands just eleven days before the tender closed. The auditor flagged it internally. Nothing happened.

That single anomaly led our team to spend fourteen months tracing a network of shell companies, offshore accounts, and politically connected intermediaries spanning three continents. What we found was not an isolated incident. It was a system — one that has quietly redirected billions of dollars in public infrastructure funding into private hands, with the knowledge and, in some cases, the active participation of senior government officials.

The mechanism is elegant in its simplicity. A government ministry issues a tender for a major infrastructure project — a highway, a port, a power plant. The contract is awarded to a company that appears, on paper, to be a legitimate construction firm. But that company is a shell. The real work, if it is done at all, is subcontracted to a third party at a fraction of the contract value. The difference disappears into a chain of offshore accounts.

"The contract is awarded to a company that appears, on paper, to be a legitimate construction firm. But that company is a shell."

From the investigation

We identified 47 contracts across 11 countries that match this pattern, with a combined value of $4.2 billion. In each case, the winning company was incorporated within six months of the tender being issued. In each case, the company shared directors, registered addresses, or beneficial owners with entities connected to senior officials in the awarding government.

The consequences for ordinary people are severe. In three of the countries we investigated, infrastructure projects that were supposed to deliver clean water, reliable electricity, or passable roads were either never completed or completed so poorly that they failed within months. Communities that were promised development received, at best, a ribbon-cutting ceremony and, at worst, nothing at all.

We put our findings to all 11 governments named in this investigation. Two did not respond. Six denied any wrongdoing. Three acknowledged that investigations were underway — investigations, we note, that were opened only after we began making enquiries.

The full dataset underlying this investigation — 14,000 documents, 2,300 corporate filings, and 180 hours of recorded interviews — has been shared with law enforcement agencies in four jurisdictions and with the relevant oversight bodies at the international development banks involved. We will continue to report on this story as it develops.