Counterpart Int'l Centre for Dev Report The International Centre for Development Reporting (ICDR) is a non-profit newsroom founded with support from the European Union. Midwifed by multiple-award winning journalist, Emmanuel Mayah, the Centre is an intervention to expose wrongdoings in a political environment where powerful media ownership, acting in concert with state actors and big businesses, ensure that no mainstream media house has a dedicated investigation desk.
Deliberately de-funded and lacking in cutting-edge skillsets, investigativereporters had become disincentivized by powerful media ownership, powerful advertisers’ interest, self-censorship, resource constraints, layoffs, victimization and dwindling media integrity; all of which had conspired to reduce commitments to accountability journalism even in the face of government’s increasing intolerance and secrecy.
ICDR is focused on corruption investigation, tax justice investigation, royalty fraud, budget tracking, shipping fraud, human rights investigation, Illicit Financial Flows(IFFs), transnational organized crime,migration and subjects of international social justice.

We are a cluster group of award-winning journalists, data miners, researchers and online activists working together in producing high-impact investigative reports. Basically, we use investigative reporting tools to interrogate fiscal policies in the development corridor including agriculture where we have reported on the abuse of the Rice Import Quota Scheme and the Export Expansion Grant (EEG).

In 2018,series of investigative reports from our newsroom revealed howthe telecom giant, MTN, secretly transferred $14 billion out of Nigeria using fraudulent Certificates of Capital Importation (CCIs). Our sustained focus on MTN finally forced the Nigerian government to find the political will to impose heavy penalties on MTN and its four bankers, namely Citi Bank, Stanbic IBTC, Standard Chartered Bank and Diamond Bank.

Maritime is the second-highest revenue earner, after oil, for Nigeria. Since inception, our newsroom has reported extensively on shipping fraud, including the activities of a Port mafia. We uncovered how “17 Companies Import Rolls Royce, 553 Bullet-Proof Vehicles into Nigeria Using Only One Form M” and“44 Companies Import 500 Containers UsingForm M – Over 9 Billion Diverted In Tariff Fraud”.

In 2019, one of our investigative-reporting projects was the “Impact evaluation of 10-year education budgets of Lagos and Sokoto States in Nigeria”. This report, commissioned by ActionAid, was initiated under the Breaking Barriers in Education campaign.

ICDR is also the publisher of The Citizen, a print publication particularly targeting rural community groups who may not have access to the internet, newspapers, radio or television. Distributed free, The Citizen magazine brings vital information on constituency projects deliberately hidden from the rural and semi-urban populations by their political representatives. Our publication has helped install community oversight mechanism, amplifycommunityvoices as well as enlists the poor, including those at the micro-level of the economy, in the fight against corruption.
TThis project focuses on one of the world’s largest independent oil traders, Vitol, and its business operations in Nigeria. Oil traders like Vitol engage in high value transactions, many of them with governments or state-owned companies, that directly impact on the economic prospects of a country. Yet, despite its economic and public importance, the commodity business is one of the most underexposed sectors of the global economy. The oil trade in particular is characterized by a lack of control and regulation, which facilitates oil traders’ exploitation of grey areas and the making of opaque deals with host-states (the oil-producing countries) that receive little public scrutiny.

This lack of oversight and accountability might explain why oil traders like Vitol take more political risk than many of the larger upstream companies, identifying business opportunities where others mainlysee risks. Consequently, they often operate in fragile and conflict-affected settings (FCAS), environments that are characterized by weak institutions and limitedaccountability. In such contexts, non-transparent transactions can easily be manipulated. The opaque transactions that international traders make in these contexts – as is the case with oil-backed loans for instance - often end up being favorable to the oil trader and detrimental to the host state.

This project seeks to raise awareness ontherisks associated with the lack of transparency and oversight in the oil trade business, particularly focusing on how these risks play out when oil traders do business with host statesaffected by conflict and fragility. The project will focus on one particular company, Vitol, and its operations in Nigeria. The focus on one company and one specific country will make it possible to do a more in-depth analysis of oil trading practices in FCAS. Specifically, we will investigate further based on the findings of the Vitol study: ‘’Big Business, Low Profile’’ produce and publish ‘The Big Stories’ on Vitol to send shockwaves across the world.