Articles
Profiles
Sam has profiled the achievements and obsessions of under-the-radar prosecutors whose efforts to fight financial crime have brought billionaires and multinational companies to heel.
He wrote about Swedish prosecutor Henrik Attorps, the architect of a landmark war crimes case against an oil company accused of aiding and abetting violence against Sudanese civilians during the country’s bloody civil war.
Sam interviewed the attorney general of Geneva for a piece of the city’s outsize impact on international financial crime. He detailed how the local public prosecutor’s office uses the transfer of funds through Geneva’s banks as a hook to punish corrupt acts that took place many thousands of miles from the picturesque Swiss city.
Sam wrote about the work of a small team of lawyers and investigators who gather evidence from inside the UK to assist financial crime investigations throughout the rest of the world. The piece centred on Serious Fraud Office lawyer Louise van der Straeten OBE who leads the work of the agency’s international assistance team.
Scoops
Sam is regularly the first reporter to cover developments in the intersecting worlds of business, financial markets, geopolitics and the law.
In April 2024 he reported how a longstanding software issue at the UK’s complex fraud prosecutor had hampered its efforts to uncover potentially exculpatory evidence – a development that raised questions about the safety of some convictions. Shortly after the article was published, the prosecution agency confirmed it was reviewing the impact of the software problem on historical cases. Sam’s original reporting was acknowledged in the Financial Times’s subsequent coverage.
He wrote in early 2024 about a unexpected, previously unreported falling out between the government of Mongolia and two whistleblowers hired to help the country renegotiate its largest foreign investment project: a gold and copper mine in the Gobi Desert.
Sam revealed new details about HM Treasury’s efforts to curtail the extravagant lifestyles of London-based oligarchs in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
In other Ukraine-related scoops, Sam reported on the corporate ownership trail linking two notorious businessmen to a controversial ski resort project in the Carpathian Mountains, revealed the FBI’s strategy of pressuring luxury services companies to turn on their Russian clients, and highlighted the lobbying activities of an NGO with close ties to the Ukrainian government.
Courts
Sam is an experienced court reporter who has covered hearings in courts and tribunals across the UK and the US.
He has also used public transparency laws to obtain documents from legal proceedings in Sweden, Switzerland, France, Brazil, South Africa and various offshore territories.
In the UK prosecution of commodities trader Glencore, Sam advocated on behalf of several media groups to obtain the names of suspects in the case who had been granted anonymity. On another occasion, the UK’s solicitor general intervened to block Sam’s efforts to obtain correspondence from a civil service trade union outlining serious working culture issues within a prosecution agency.
Besides countless same-day reports from court hearings, Sam has also written features on long-running legal disputes and criminal prosecutions, drawing on months, sometimes years, of reporting on the cases. These have included deep-dives into the collapse of fraud charges against three former G4S managers and the prosecution of four Swedish telecoms executives for alleged bribery in Djibouti.