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A major new cross-border investigation has shown how criminal networks across Europe are exploiting hawala, the centuries-old informal money-transfer system, to launder billions of euros from drug and human trafficking, terror financing and tax fraud. 

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The investigation was spearheaded by public service media journalists from Denmark (DR), Belgium (VRT and RTBF), Spain (RTVE) and Austria (ORF), coordinated by the EBU Investigative Journalism Network (IJN), and supported by grants from Journalismfund Europe and the Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) fund. 

Cross-border crime – cross-border investigation 

Filming across Europe and the Middle East, the teams interviewed national and international security forces, hawaladars, former money launderers, hawala users, prosecutors, and legal and financial experts.  

The Danish team compiled more than 23,000 financial transactions from Danish ‘invoice factories’ and followed their trail between Europe and the main hubs, which authorities place in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, outside European jurisdiction. The Belgian journalists were granted access to thousands of court records from Europe’s biggest hawala case, while their Spanish counterparts accompanied police on raids to dismantle hawala-financed human-trafficking rings, which increasingly involve cryptocurrency and international networks, including Chinese hawaladars. 

Their reporting exposes a shadowy, unregulated global banking system described by authorities as ‘the lifeblood of organized crime’: hierarchical networks of hawaladars running operations out of shopfronts in European cities. In one encrypted messaging group alone, 532 hawala brokers exchanged more than 82,000 messages over nine months, arranging transfers worth hundreds of millions of euros, unseen and unregulated.  

The journalists also documented how hawala networks provide an escrow service for migrant smugglers, and how thousands of European companies have received payments from shell companies moving cash from illicit activities, in so-called third-party payments – a legal practice that is being abused to commit VAT and tax fraud and to evade international sanctions. 

Genesis of the project 

This latest EBU Investigative Journalism Network project began in late 2023 when Danish public broadcaster DR brought the story to the annual IJN workshop. In spring 2024 a reporting group was formed, and for the next two years they shared findings, sources, interviews and footage, steadily piecing together the workings of this global hawala system. 

Kasper Vilsmark, Managing Editor at Monday Production, which produced the film on behalf of Danish broadcaster DR, said:  

‘Uncovering cross-border crime requires cross-border cooperation. By collaborating we could distribute tasks thematically and geographically to achieve wider global reach and a far deeper understanding of the subject. The EBU Investigative Journalism Network took on the substantial task of coordinating our efforts and pulling everything together. We hope the many journalistic productions resulting from this project will help shed light on a phenomenon that remains largely unknown to the public.’ 

Pascal Seynhaeve, editor-in-chief of Pano, VRT’s investigative programme, said teaming up with peers around Europe brought a global perspective to an issue they were already aware of locally: 

‘Hawala was already familiar to our journalists from years of reporting on human smuggling, so when our Danish colleagues proposed investigating it through the EBU Investigative Journalism Network, it immediately caught our attention. By sharing research, expertise, footage and fact-checking across borders, we were able to connect dots that would have been almost impossible to see on our own. This project shows the real power of international collaboration in investigative journalism.’  

EBU Senior Editor for Investigative and Collaborative Journalism, Belén López Garrido, who heads the IJN, said the project shows the essential value of EBU Members working together across borders.  

‘The IJN shows what public service media companies can achieve when they pool their strengths and talents. A lone newsroom could not have traced this system on its own. By cooperating as a unit, our Members could pool their local expertise, access to exclusive sources and their reporting resources across a dozen countries to expose a network whose continued success depends on its invisibility.’ 

Broadcast and publication 

Starting this week, the five EBU Members that worked on the investigation are scheduled to publish multi-platform coverage of the story including documentaries, news and current affairs programming. The investigation will be republished by others in the wider EBU network and is available to all EBU Members for republication, subject to the Investigative Journalism Network’s usual conditions.  
 
About the EBU Investigative Journalism Network  The IJN is an international consortium of investigative journalists and editors from EBU Member organizations, working together on cross-border investigations of public interest.