A major FTSE 100 company requested due diligence to be conducted on a very influential figure in the Balkans, prior to investing £50 million in a planned joint venture.

Solution:
Research carried out in the Region indicated that the individual concerned was a leading member of an extensive and vicious organised crime gang and had personally eliminated several opponents; even the serial numbers of the weapons used were provided to the tasking company. Additionally the company was informed that its own local staff in the Balkans were sufficiently alarmed as to be ready to resign in the event that the deal went ahead.

Extracts from Balkan and Swiss newspapers were provided to indicate that Interpol was likely to issue an arrest warrant for the potential partner in the foreseeable future for extensive smuggling. The joint venture deal was called off and the company maintained both its corporate reputation intact and the loyalty of its staff.

Background Screening:
A leading multinational requested background screening on a UK national who had found casual employment as head of an IT project in the Russia-based subsidiary of the mother company. The intention was to appoint the subject of the check to a senior permanent position in the IT Division of the multinational’s London head office.

Solution:
Research on the individual, conducted in the UK, Ireland and a number of other European countries, revealed that all academic qualifications claimed by the subject were fictitious and strongly suggested that he had served time in a West European country’s jail. Invited to account for discrepancies in his CV and to return to his home country and produce original academic certificates, he resigned on the spot from the Moscow subsidiary.

Background Checks:
A household name manufacturing company was intending to enter the market in a Central European country; it required a distributor for its goods, which were initially to be imported but would later be produced in situ. Two candidate companies had been identified.

Solution:
Background checks showed that the General Managers of both companies had formerly been senior members of the country’s intelligence and security services until the establishment there of a democratic constitution. In the first years after post-communist independence arrived, both men had made a fortune of several million US dollars.

Enquiries confirmed that each had taken a large number of official intelligence files away from their place of work and had used their contents to blackmail prominent members of both the old and new regimes on a regular basis. As a result, the multinational tasking company accepted a recommendation to enter into partnership with a third entity, whose bona fides had emerged in the course of the investigation.

Back Ground Checks:
A leading UK company, with subsidiaries and offices worldwide, sought assistance in checking the background of a recently appointed Finance Director recruited by and to its Cyprus operation.

Solution:
Background enquiries revealed that the lady concerned had falsified all her previous employment history, grossly overstating her achievements and responsibilities in the US. Further research elicited that she had been brought back from New York to her home country of Cyprus at the instigation of an influential person with powerful local political and criminal connections, with the explicit intent of infiltrating her into the multinational, in order to act as a mole from within and that she had become his mistress.

Checks of her relationships with the company’s staff revealed that she had deliberately initiated an affair with the IT manager in order to compromise and breach IT security. She was found, with this employee’s complicity, to have entered and monitored the emails of all company directors. On being confronted with the evidence, she and the IT manager were dismissed and the company’s IT systems and procedures were overhauled.