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Reportercast September 2023 with Steve Middleton: on the Ulster Bank scandal
Steve Middleton is a financial adviser specialised in regulation and he has taken up the cause of Northern Irish business owners who accuse Ulster Bank (a subsidiary of NatWest group) of fraud. The allegations are only now coming to the fore but the issues date from the years around the great financial crisis of 2008…
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Reportercast August 2023 with Amazon’s Abigail Bishop on scams and other fraud
Abigail Bishop is Amazon’s “Head of External Relations, Scams Prevention” and her job is to campaign to educate Amazon’s customers about scams being run against them around the world. These scams are of multiple types and growing increasingly sophisticated, with Bishop citing low reporting rates as an additional issue. She also spoke to host Matei…
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Reportercast July 2023 with Valeriya Melnichuk, strategic advisor for Ukraine
Valeriya Melnichuk is a former BBC Monitoring journalist who has worked in the public relations department at the Ukrainian finance ministry during the intense period of the nationalization of PrivatBank and liquidation of numerous other smaller lenders which had been fraudulent or corrupt. Her boss at the time was finance minister Oleksandr Danylyuk, who Reportercast…
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Reportercast June 2023: with ex-Israeli military intelligence officer Yair Samban on terrorism financing
In this special one-year anniversary edition of our website and podcast, we dive deep into terrorism financing with field expert Yair Samban, who is currently a specialist consultant at Pegasystems, an IT company, and a former officer with Israeli military intelligence, tasked with analysing money flows to detect potential terrorists. Samban also wrote a book…
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Reportercast May 2023: On crypto gambling with Philip Newall and Maira Andrade
Investigative academics Philip Newall and Maira Andrade tell host Matei Rosca all about the intricacies of crypto gambling, a new type of gambling which has been found to pose risks both for consumers and the integrity of the financial system. They also discuss more broadly the latest regulations proposed by the UK government for gambling…
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Reportercast January 2023 with Dan Neidle, on the Nadhim Zahawi scandal, corporate transparency and libel law
The last Reportercast of the season (meaning we’re taking a break to plan this experiment’s future) features Dan Neidle, a tax and transparency expert and founder of the Tax Policy Associates think tank, who has been in the news frequently in recent weeks over the key role he played in uncovering the scandal around Tory…
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Reportercast December 2022 with Garrett Ziegler on the Hunter Biden saga
Ho, ho, ho… Merry Christmas to everyone, especially the people interested in our Reportercast. And this latest festive episode dropping today features a man who is at the heart of one of the biggest stories in the world, that of the controversies surrounding Hunter Biden, the son of US President Joe Biden, alleged illegal lobbying…
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Reportercast November 2022: Valeria Hontareva on Ukraine’s reconstruction and banking reforms
Welcome, people, to November’s Reportercast, with a very distinguished guest – Valeria Hontareva, the former central bank governor of Ukraine (2014-2017), and now a world-famous expert on finance reforms, banking governance and monetary policy. Hontareva is also one of the bravest central bankers the world has ever seen, having closed dozens of dirty banks affiliated…
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Reportercast October 2022 with Alexandru Flenchea: Transnistria explainer
In this special episode of Reportercast, Alexandru Flenchea, a former negotiator for Moldova’s government on the issue of Russia-occupied separatist Transnistria, and former advisor to the US embassy in Moldova, joins host Matei Rosca to discuss little-known Transnistria’s role in the Ukraine invasion. Flenchea, who also runs a Transnistria-focused NGO in Moldova called Initiative 4…
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Reportercast September 2022: Bradley Birkenfeld on whistleblowing
People, September’s Reportercast has appeared. Our guest for this edition is world-famous whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld, a self-described “hammer looking for nails” known for exposing a multi-billion tax scam at UBS and receiving what at the time was the largest reward in US history for his disclosure, which led to the overhauling of the Swiss banking…