It is often said that the best way to solve a white-collar crime is to follow the money.
 
In the case of Swedish network giant Ericsson, following the company’s outbound money has recently led the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) down a rabbit hole of bribes, kidnapping, and equipment smuggling stretching from ISIS-controlled territories to South America. On Sunday, ICIJ published a chilling exposé of the media colossus, evidencing the company’s years of concealed bribery and fraud in Iraq and war-torn regions in the Middle East controlled by ISIS.
 
Seventy three pages of an internal investigation report at Ericsson were leaked to the Consortium, which partnered with The Washington Post and SVT in Sweden, as well as an additional 28 media partners to dissect and analyse the report. Known as the Ericsson List, ICIJ and its partners spent months authenticating the leak and its contents, interviewing ex-employees, government officials, contractors and other industry insiders. As they scoured through the documents, following the money proved harder than they thought. According to spreadsheets contained in the report, tens of millions of dollars in payments were made in sham contracts, inflated invoices and falsified statements to sustain the company’s business in Iraq. Much of this money ended up in the hands of middlemen, so-called consultants, regional defence specialists, subcontractors—your typical nice guys with nebulous job descriptions and tentacled insider connections.
 
After Mosul fell to ISIS in 2014, a senior Ericsson lawyer had voiced his concerns to upper management about continuing the company’s operations in Iraq, but was quickly shut down, saying that leaving the country would “destroy” Ericsson’s business in the region. Worse yet, as the company’s employees continued to work in the region, one even alleged he was kidnapped by ISIS fighters over bribe money and was released a month later with a hunch that his manager had paid for his return home.
 
Among the revelations from the Ericsson List, one that sticks out is that the company sought permission from the Islamic State to work in ISIS-controlled cities and paid to smuggle equipment through a route known as the “Speedway”, to avoid official government checkpoints.
 
Why war-torn Iraq was so central to Ericsson’s business is hard to tell. The company’s chief executive Borje Ekholm has declined to provide comment to outlets who investigated the leak. His last comment was made last week, when rumours were spreading that Ericsson was dealing in shady business, before anyone knew what that business was and prior to the ICIJ’s report. In it, he admitted that the company’s internal probe had found “serious breaches of compliance rules and the company’s code of business ethics”, but that ultimately, “the probe could not determine the final recipients of the money”. 
 
Ericsson was chosen over Huawei to lay the UK’s 5G network nationwide for fears the Chinese telecom company posed security concerns. After all, who ever said anything about integrity?