The tiny state of Luxembourg is the world's second-biggest destination for foreign capital thanks to the opacity of its financial systems. In 2018, the country created a database that would reveal the ultimate beneficial owners of all the companies registered therein. However, the database is not searchable by the owners' names, which made it much harder to determine beneficial owners.

But a team from the French newspaper Le Monde managed to scrape the registry's website and obtain 3.3 million documents, covering hundreds of thousands of companies based in Luxembourg. With a help of their international media partners, Le Monde's team dug deeper into the people who are benefiting from the companies and explored weaknesses in anti-money laundering frameworks in Luxembourg and the EU.

Maxime Vaudano, Jérémie Baruch and Maxime Ferrer from Le Monde will share with us the making of Open Lux, explain us how they've managed to analyse the documents and identify people of interest in the datasets and cross-check them.

OpenLux : the secrets of Luxembourg, a tax haven at the heart of Europe