One of Nepal's most respected investigative journalists, Rudra Pangeni, completed our five-day, in-person illicit finance training in 2019. Rudra told us it transformed his journalism.

Armed with strong leads and eager to learn, Rudra was investigating the powerful investors who had made a fortune selling shares in Nepal's largest telecom company and he asked if we could help.

The sale was at the centre of a huge tax avoidance investigation by authorities. With his excellent colleague, Deepak Adhikari, we assembled documents from secrecy jurisdictions to reveal potential flouting of Nepal’s laws on foreign exchange controls, taxation, and foreign ownership.

The impact from our story was strong: the government of Nepal presented our collaborative Ncell story with the Centre for investigative Journalism-Nepal as evidence to the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes in a taxation case won by the country.

Buoyed with this success, Rudra and Deepak asked us to work with them again. In June 2023, we revealed for the first time the colourful international business figures behind the offshore companies that had sold two Airbus jets to Nepal Airlines in 2017 for $216.38m.

We unpicked the procurement process surrounding Nepal's largest ever jet purchases and showed how decisions to water down purchase specifications lost Nepal tens of millions of dollars.

In December 2024, Nepal convicted four top officials in the resulting corruption case.