New PACIFICi Portal to assist investigative journalists, police and AML efforts

With the Pacific Island region increasingly impacted by organised transnational crime, international drug and people smuggling, money laundering and corruption, a new web-based investigative tool, PACIFICi, is set to become an important resource for activists, journalists, anti-corruption/AML specialists and law enforcement.

The PACIFICi Portal gives unique access to company ownership data and governance reporting across four Pacific Island nations; Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu.

The Portal is based on the design of the highly successful PNGi Portal that has been assisting a wide range of users with governance investigations and background checks in Papua New Guinea since 2017.

The PACIFICi Portal allows users to search across company records and governance reports for the four included countries in one simple step and to identify cross-border connections as well as map local networks.

The Portal contains details of 65,000 registered corporate entities and more than forty official reports from bodies like Parliamentary Committees, Commissions of Inquiry and Auditor Generals.

As well as assisting investigative journalists and anti-corruption and trans-national crime investigators the new Portal should be an important resource for all those involved in international anti-money laundering efforts. This include commercial banks, lawyers, accountants and real-estate agents who are all now required to conduct enhanced ‘know your client’ due diligence.

Search results on the new Portal can be filtered by country, date or alphabetically and advanced search options allow address searches and direct document searches.

The Portal is encouraging users to help build the database’s collection of governance reports by submitting further documents by email (to [email protected]) or by offering suggestions on where further reports can be located.