Our U.S. client was a judgment creditor to a Brazilian company that collapsed. The client asked us to check out rumors that the Brazilian company was paying back its local creditors while “stiffing” its non-Brazilian creditors.

We quickly found a Brazilian news article accusing the company of using an offshore entity (in a Caribbean tax haven) to repay local friends. In the article, the company's bankers were quoted as denying any connection between the company and the offshore entity. But our Caribbean sources found evidence tracing the Brazilians to this offshore entity through layers of nominees.

We did an investigation for the London branch of an Asian bank after several of its borrowers went bankrupt. There were rumors that one of the branch's top officers had been paid off to approve the bad loans.

We dug into the background of the relevant bank officers as well as the borrowers, looking for undisclosed ties. We found none, and our report to that effect helped the bank address the concerns of various constituencies.

Our client had invented a technology that he believed a dot-com later misappropriated and used as the basis of its business. We investigated the theft by interviewing everyone who had physical access to the client's materials, and then looking for any ties these people had to the dot-com. We identified people who not only had access to our client's materials but had even gone to work for the dot-com.