SourceMaterial

Last year, Tomazina travelled to the TotalEnergies compound near her village in northern Mozambique in search of a job. “There were so many people,” she told SourceMaterial. But one man seemed important and promised to help. “You could see it in his uniform, in the way he dressed and his demeanour. It was clear that he had responsibilities inside the project.” His offer came with a condition: she would need to have sex with him. In order to feed her family, she agreed.

By SourceMaterial and Nathaniel Peutherer Do you want to sell drones to Russia? Are international sanctions putting an inconvenient brake on profits? Dima is on hand to help. “We have our own companies all over Europe,” says the broker in a chat on Telegram, the encrypted messaging platform, explaining how he can easily route illegal payments from Russia to Europe through a string of intermediaries.

Kiwala, a rusty hulk nearly the size of the Titanic, was heading through the Baltic Sea to Russia to collect a cargo of sanctioned oil when it was surrounded by Estonian navy boats and helicopters. The sanctioned tanker was sailing with no national flag—a breach of maritime law. Inspectors who boarded in April 2025 found 17 serious faults that made the vessel unseaworthy and impounded it for two weeks until they were fixed.

In March 2022, days after the first wave of Russian tanks surged over the border with Ukraine, dockers at Ellesmere Port in Cheshire took a stand. Appalled by Vladimir Putin’s brutality, they vowed not to unload any Russian oil destined for the nearby Stanlow refinery, the major hub for tankers delivering fuel supplies into the North West of England.

The Italian agent brought a flurry of excitement when he arrived in Kilifi County with news of a wonder-crop: castor. Diego Barili was an intermediary for Eni, Italy’s state-owned energy giant. If farmers in Kilifi, north of Kenya’s port city of Mombasa, switched to growing castor, he said, he would pay life-changing cash for plants that Eni would turn into green fuel for customers including BMW, EasyJet and Ryanair. Katsele Shauri Mitsanze was one of many who jumped at the opportunity.

Indonesian companies targeted in a palm oil fraud probe supplied European firms including Italian energy giant Eni and Finnish sustainable aviation fuel leader Neste, an investigation by SourceMaterial and AFP has found. Police last month detained 11 people on suspicion of bribing officials to help them disguise palm oil as a less strictly regulated byproduct called palm oil mill effluent, or POME, Indonesia’s attorney general’s office said.

By SourceMaterial and Sushmita Each day Kiran Kasbe drives a rickshaw taxi through his home neighbourhood of Mahul on Mumbai’s eastern seafront, down streets lined with stalls selling tomatoes, bottle gourds and aubergines—and, frequently, through thick smog. Earlier this year, doctors found three tumours in his 54-year-old mother’s brain. It’s not clear exactly what caused her cancer. But her illness was made more likely by the coal plant a few hundred metres down the road.

Amazon uses far more data centres across the globe—and has a bigger impact on the environment—than previously reported, leaked data reveals. The Seattle-based company has bet billions of dollars on an expansion into cloud computing and AI-assisted services, from automated coding to translation, and is building hundreds of data centres worldwide as it vies with Microsoft and Google for leadership of the booming AI market.

The family of Chinese billionaire Jack Ma bought a £19.5 million London mansion amid a rapprochement with Chinese authorities after years of scrutiny and political exile. Ma’s wife, Cathy Ying Zhang, acquired the six-bedroom Edwardian house, formerly the Italian embassy, in London’s elite Belgravia district in October 2024, property records show. The purchase came after Ma’s return to public life after disappearing from view in the aftermath of a speech criticising China’s financial system.

Francesco Mazzagatti is on the brink of becoming one of Britain’s most powerful industrialists. In five years the 39-year-old Italian has built an oil and gas group with annual sales of £400 million. His company, Viaro, now awaits a rubber stamp from UK authorities to buy 11 North Sea gasfields from Shell—a half-billion-dollar deal that includes the Bacton terminal that supplies about a fifth of Britain’s gas.