OUR ETHICS

ETHICAL INTELLIGENCE

We are in the business of transparency. There is no secret sauce to how we obtain information: just language skills, mastery of the public record/open sources, longstanding human intelligence networks and hard work.

We don’t think our clients want to be exposed to the risk of handling information obtained though murky or illegal methods. And we wouldn’t take on clients who do.

ETHICAL CLIENTS

In the intelligence business, it can be easy to make a quick buck. Oligarchs, passport-investment schemes, tobacco and coal companies, the asbestos lobby, autocrats and sex offenders: the list of unsavoury clients linked to investigative firms in recent years is way too long. We decided a long time ago to leave such clients to the competition. We don’t want their money, and our staff wouldn’t accept working for them.

ETHICAL GOVERNANCE

We seek to practice what we preach. We are fully employee-owned, with no majority shareholder and all staff having access to ownership. We pay our fair taxes as a UK-headquartered company, rather than incorporating in a tax haven. We work to have a democratic, transparent decision-making structure. Data protection is core to our business, and we hold ourselves to the highest privacy standards as a controller of personal data.

Don’t just take our word for it: we are the first and only diligence and investigations firm to be certified as a B Corp, existing to benefit all our stakeholders and independently certified as such.

ETHICAL EMPLOYER

Our people are our greatest resource. We strive to provide our staff with meaningful careers, fair compensation and support in balancing work and family life. We take a proactive approach to prevent burnout, a major challenge for consultancies. We have zero tolerance for abusive managers and discrimination. We believe that employee satisfaction drives stability in our workforce and delivers value to our clients. 

We have been ranked by B Lab two years running - in 2022 and 2021 - as amongst the top 5% of all B Corps globally for employee-friendly policies.

PURPOSE BUILT

Everything we do is based on our ability to rapidly obtain information anywhere in the world, assess its credibility, place it in useful context and make recommendations. We are not a private security company, accountancy or lobbying firm with a side business in intelligence and an array of conflicts. Intelligence is our business.