Shadow World Investigations

We undertake path-breaking investigations into cases of grand corruption, corporate malfeasance and excessive militarism, predominantly in the global arms trade

[Shadow World Investigations @ShadowWorldInv1]

Help us expose the lies of the global arms trade.

SWI + @andrewfeinstein are writing a book on how the West profits from enabling the slaughter in Gaza & Yemen.

Please support if you can.
https://t.co/F41GEBELEg

[Corruption Tracker @ArmsTradeCT]

In his 2016 testimony, former Finmeccanica (now Leonardo) Commercial Director, Pozzessere said he wasn't alarmed by the payment of bribes to secure arms contracts with Panama, explaining that in Central America it was considered "normal practice".
https://t.co/Piaazbc2g8

[The Fraud @StarmertheFraud]

In 2024 Wes Streeting said that South Africa's ICJ case was a "distraction."

[Canary @TheCanaryUK]

Palantir's power over UK police, military and health infrastructure should worry us all — the MPs are correct, the plug needs to be pulled

Via @jjgjourno
https://t.co/7aGhuIAjjg

[Shadow World Investigations @ShadowWorldInv1]

Get your tickets now to Marxism 2026: Britain's biggest left wing festival.

It brings together meetings, mass rallies, speakers, debates, live music, a culture tent, film screenings, and more.

Thursday 2 to Sunday 5 July in Shoreditch, London.

https://t.co/8g8JrtuyW0

[Shadow World Investigations @ShadowWorldInv1]

Over 2,000 British-Israelis have served for the IDF amid the Gaza genocide and not one of them has been prosecuted or even seriously investigated.

Nobody wants to live next to a potential war criminal.

This is an incredibly important letter to sign: https://t.co/qPEVRaNSNK

[John McEvoy @jmcevoy_2]

It is incredibly anti-Semitic to conflate the genocide being committed by the IDF with Jews everywhere.

Yet this is precisely what pro-Israel figures have sought to do in response to our campaign letter, which calls for Britons who fought for the IDF in Gaza to be investigated in line with international and domestic law.

Under the Geneva Convention, the UK government is obligated to do everything in its power to prevent and punish genocide.

That would include preventing its own citizens from participating in an active genocide, and ensuring that those who do are not complicit in war crimes.

Universal jurisdiction also allows for courts to prosecute individuals committing the most serious international crimes - such as genocide, war crimes, and torture - regardless of where the act occurred.

Notwithstanding these legal obligations, over 2,000 British-Israelis have served for the IDF amid the Gaza genocide and not one of them has been prosecuted or even seriously investigated.

The right-wing media has rounded on Zack Polanski, the only Jewish leader of major political party, for signing his name to these very basic demands. He has been subjected to some of the most disgusting abuse I have seen on this website.

Fortunately, most people are not buying it. The letter has been signed by prominent figures including human rights lawyer Michael Mansfield, anti-apartheid campaigner Andrew Feinstein, genocide scholar Martin Shaw, Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu Sittah, as well as almost 16,000 members of the public.

The pro-Israel lobby and right-wing press want to intimidate people who are demanding basic accountability and the upholding of international law.

It's important not to be cowed. You can sign the letter here: https://t.co/86vTdnuNO1

[Dr Iain Overton @iainoverton]

1/ New @AOAV research finds that nearly 60% of retired senior British military figures with links to the defence industry were, at least once, presented in UK media as independent experts without disclosure of their commercial interests.

🧵https://t.co/4JGAYCzinv

[Palästinaforum @palaestinaforum]

Yesterday the historic student assembly at the University of Vienna sent a clear signal to power about what this generation wants!

It also marked the end of our resistance week with @andrewfeinstein. So honoured to have had him here, an inspiration as always!

[Corruption Tracker @ArmsTradeCT]

In case you missed our latest blog on Wagner's role in the imperialistic bleeding of Sudanese gold, its training and arming of violent armed actors, and its illicit transfer of arms to the RSF, by @NickKBehrouzi👇

https://t.co/PctvySgF1u

[The Fraud @StarmertheFraud]

Absolutely huge congrutulations to Khadija Sarife and @PeterKGeoghegan on winning the Paul Foot Award for their work on the Labour Together and APCO scandal, and how it targeted myself, my family, my colleagues at @ShadowWorldInv1 including @andrewfeinstein, as well as journalists like @Gabriel_Pogrund who also suffered APCO and Labour Together's scandalous attentions.

Khadija deserves huge credit for her incredible work developing this story, working for years with sources and operating in extreme conditions. Peter's coverage in his brilliant DemocracyForSale was instrumental in breaking the story wide open and exposing how the Labour Together/APCO scandal went to the very top of the Labour Party.

I have written multiple times about the Labour Together and APCO scandal, and I won't repeat myself endlessly here. But what I can say is that Khadija was instrumental in alerting me to the scale and content of this scandal, which allowed me, my family and my colleagues to take proactive measures to defend ourselves and our reputations. I am forever grateful for her and Peter's work.

@johnmcdonnellMP has recently called for a full Parliamentary inquiry into the Labour Together Project; a call I wholeheartedly endorse. Having recently seen new documents, and new disclosures, I can tell you all that this story is going nowhere.

[The Fraud @StarmertheFraud]

@PeterKGeoghegan @ShadowWorldInv1 @andrewfeinstein Of course, it goes without saying that both @PulaRJS and @OborneTweets also deserve huge credit for breaking the first iterative instalment of this story in @ScotNational!

[Shadow World Investigations @ShadowWorldInv1]

👏👏👏

[The Fraud @StarmertheFraud]

Absolutely huge congrutulations to Khadija Sarife and @PeterKGeoghegan on winning the Paul Foot Award for their work on the Labour Together and APCO scandal, and how it targeted myself, my family, my colleagues at @ShadowWorldInv1 including @andrewfeinstein, as well as journalists like @Gabriel_Pogrund who also suffered APCO and Labour Together's scandalous attentions.

Khadija deserves huge credit for her incredible work developing this story, working for years with sources and operating in extreme conditions. Peter's coverage in his brilliant DemocracyForSale was instrumental in breaking the story wide open and exposing how the Labour Together/APCO scandal went to the very top of the Labour Party.

I have written multiple times about the Labour Together and APCO scandal, and I won't repeat myself endlessly here. But what I can say is that Khadija was instrumental in alerting me to the scale and content of this scandal, which allowed me, my family and my colleagues to take proactive measures to defend ourselves and our reputations. I am forever grateful for her and Peter's work.

@johnmcdonnellMP has recently called for a full Parliamentary inquiry into the Labour Together Project; a call I wholeheartedly endorse. Having recently seen new documents, and new disclosures, I can tell you all that this story is going nowhere.

[Shadow World Investigations @ShadowWorldInv1]

Please consider signing this important petition by our friends at @ForcesWatch telling the government NO TO MILITARY CONSCRIPTION!

For the first time in generations, the threat of conscription seems very real. We must act now to oppose it.
https://t.co/eaFQcKLwdZ

[The Fraud @StarmertheFraud]

This is very interesting.

Here, @ZackPolanski talks about disproportionate media scrutiny. He brings up Labour Together, Josh Simons and the scandal around Labour Together hiring APCO Worldwide to target journalists, including me. Before Polanski can complete his point, he is interrupted by @robpowellnews, who says that was appropriately reported by the media.

But that's not what happened AT ALL.

In fact, I can now reveal, for the first time, that an as-yet unknown journalist at the Guardian KNEW about this story for 2 years and didn't report it.

I found this out in from my Subject Access Request to Labour Together. I've copied a screengrab below. It shows that in February 2024, Josh Simons forwarded a series of emails to the journalist. The emails had been sent by Simons and his Chief of Staff at Labour Together to the National Cyber Security Centre.

You'll note in the attached image that the name of the Guardian journalist has been blacked out. But Labour Together have confirmed that they were, indeed, a Guardian journalist.

The emails forwarded by Simons show that Labour Together had told the NCSC that I was at the centre of a mad conspiracy theory, making all sorts of wild, ludicrous, highly defamatory allegations about me, my colleague @andrewfeinstein, and my family. The emails explicitly mention that Labour Together had attached an extensive report on which these seriously defamatory allegations was based. It also made it clear that Labour Together had done this after I worked with the Sunday Times and other outlets to break stories about Labour Together and Morgan McSweeney's unlawful conduct.

What makes this all particularly egregious is that me and @andrewfeinstein have had a long relationship with the Guardian.

Andrew had worked with it's investigative team since the mid-2000s, focusing on investigating BAE Systems and corruption. The Guardian positively reviewed his book, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, on which I also worked. The award-winning feature documentary based on the book, made by recent Oscar nominee director Johan Grimonperez, featured a lengthy interview with the inimitable David Leigh about the BAE story. Leigh was the Guardian and Observer's long-time head of investigations.

I started collaborating with the Guardian investigation team in the mid-2010s, focusing on corruption at AgustaWestland. The Guardian also splashed with an investigation based on my work in South Africa in 2022, which had been covered by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Andrew and I had both written for the paper, worked on joint investigations, and also acted as sources for Guardian stories. There are any number of stories where we are not credited but where we provided key information or connected the paper to whistleblowers.

This is not to cloak me and Andrew in mainstream respectability or buff our credentials, but to point out that debunking the lunatic claims in the NCSC emails would have taken five minutes and a few phonecalls around the Guardian office. Perhaps then the Guardian could have reported on this despicable attempt to destroy the reputation of long-time Guardian contributors and collaborators with fabrications and conspiracy theories by the people on their way to forming the next government.

But that didn't happen. Instead, a journalist at the Guardian KNEW that Simons and Labour Together had been doing all this outrageous stuff to protect Starmer and McSweeney. For two years: while Labour Together was funding 100 incoming MPs, Josh Simons was getting parachuted into Makerfield and Morgan McSweeney rose to the position of Chief of Staff. And nothing was reported.

We now know, of course, that the highest levels of the Labour Party had also been copied into discussions about the mad Labour Together/APCO investigation, including McSweeney himself and head of Comms, Paul Ovenden (who was later forced to resign as Chief of Strategy in Number 10 because of revelations from my book).

Just how many other people in Labour knew? Just how many other journalists knew? We still don't know. Can't say that mainstream outlets have done anything much to help me find out; half the time, as with the BBC, they don't even bother to ask me or Andrew to comment the scandal before amplifying the exculpatory self-justifications of Simons and his ilk.

In the end it took brave INDEPENDENT journalists like Khadija Shariffe & Peter Geoghegan (rightly now nominated for the Paul Foot Award), @PulaRJS and @OborneTweets to break the story. While I'm endlessly grateful for that reporting, and this story breaking through into the mainstream through the dogged work of Peter and Khadija, it should never have taken this long, and it speaks volumes that it only really did so after it was revealed that the Labour Together/APCO investigation had also targeted journalists at the Guardian and Sunday Times.

Just imagine the Guardian had reported on this back in February 2024.
Just imagine the Guardian, which has NEVER, not once, properly reported on the Labour Together donations story, decided to look into McSweeney's unlawful conduct.
Just imagine the public had been made aware of the character of Morgan McSweeney and the nature of this political project.
Maybe, just maybe, McSweeney's wretched, scandalous proclivities wouldn't have destroyed the first Labour government in 15 years, opening up the way for Reform, and tainting the Labour Party with the stench of Mandelson and the horrors of Epstein.
Maybe Starmer, so coddled and protected by the Guardian's soft-touch reporting, would have been made battle-hardened and ready for governance by some proper scrutiny and challenge.
Or maybe we could have found out, long before this current crisis, that he wasn't up for the task.

But don't try to pretend that there is an equality of scrutiny in the media, and that the mainstream media is fearlessly holding the powerful to task with the same rigour that makes it to literally go rooting around Polanski's dirty laundry.

[Corruption Tracker @ArmsTradeCT]

More on this #UnravellingTuesday, by @alwandekhumalo1: https://t.co/aeAy8RvgTc

[Corruption Tracker @ArmsTradeCT]

NEW CASE 🚨 | Nigera's Armsgate Scandal: The Deals of A. Hima

By the early 2010s, Nigeria was confronting an escalating insurgency led by Boko Haram, a militant group whose attacks placed severe strain on national security and military capacity.

[Andrew Feinstein @andrewfeinstein]

My letter to @Arsenal about their appalling treatment of a long-time employee fired because of his views on Palestine:

[Andrew Feinstein @andrewfeinstein]

A drone symposium in Vienna this week! Why are these Merchants of Death being welcomed with open arms?

[The Fraud @StarmertheFraud]

Joint Statement: Paul Holden and Andrew Feinstein Regarding Labour Together, APCO and the Labour Party

On Wednesday last week we received documents from Labour Together following Subject Access Requests that we submitted to Labour Together in February 2026. The documents provided by Labour Together are deeply disturbing.

They show that Labour Together and APCO targeted us, our colleagues, our associates and Paul’s family with utterly false and highly defamatory allegations, and that this was done with the knowledge of the highest levels of the Labour Party. Indeed, we are now of the view that the operation to investigate us, our families and associates was effectively a joint operation run by the Labour Party, Labour Together and APCO.

This highly invasive campaign was launched because of Paul’s factually accurate reporting. This reporting raised serious questions about whether Labour Together and Morgan McSweeney deliberately failed to report £730,000 in donations to the Electoral Commission in violation of the law. It is now plain that Sir Keir Starmer benefited from the work funded by these donations and that they facilitated his rise to power.

We are calling for a full inquiry into Labour Together.

We also call on Sir Keir Starmer to clarify his role in this scandal. Considering the documents that have been disclosed to date, we find it nearly inconceivable that Sir Keir Starmer did not know about this despicable project that included Labour Together reporting us to the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), a part of GCHQ, based on utterly false and highly defamatory allegations. These highly defamatory allegations were then shared with at least one major newspaper outlet.

The newly released documents reveal six important facts.

First, they show that Morgan McSweeney and Paul Ovenden were aware of the APCO and Labour Together investigation into us from at least January 2024. McSweeney was the Labour Party’s head of campaigns and subsequently Sir Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff in Number 10. Paul Ovenden was the Director of Labour Party communications and subsequently Head of Strategy in Number 10.

The emails show Simons arranging a meeting between himself, Ovenden, McSweeney and Tom Harper, a senior APCO employee, to discuss the investigation into us. A third Labour employee was copied into the email, but, because of redactions, we do not know who this is. We ask the Labour Party to confirm who else was copied into this correspondence.

The excellent @PeterKGeoghegan and Democracy for Sale have confirmed with a Labour Party source that the intended meeting did take place.

Second, they show that APCO’s Tom Harper actively coached Josh Simons and Labour Together on how to submit a ‘crime complaint’ about us to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a part of GCHQ. Harper provided text for Simons to submit to the NCSC. The decision to complain about us to the NCSC was made only days after Simons had emailed McSweeney, Ovenden and Harper about APCO’s upcoming report into us, asking for a meeting to discuss its contents.

Third, Josh Simons has repeatedly claimed in public that he appointed APCO to investigate a ‘hack’ of Labour Together materials. But the new documents show that Labour Together and Simons did not conduct any meaningful cybersecurity review to establish whether materials had been hacked from Labour Together, or where else they may have been sourced from.

Labour Together did, however, appoint a cybersecurity expert to review a potential hack in late 2025. This review, a summary of which has now been disclosed to us, shows that there was no ‘hack’ of Labour Together. This is obviously true, as we have repeatedly explained that the investigation into Labour Together was based on documents legally leaked from the Labour Party by whistleblowers concerned about misconduct by the Party’s most senior officials, open-source materials, and Freedom of Information requests.

Fourth, they show that Josh Simons and Labour Together told the NCSC that they were reporting us because they were concerned that Paul’s reporting ‘may be a co-ordinated effort to discredit Labour Together in order to undermine Mr McSweeney and by extension, Mr. Starmer in the run-up to next year’s general election.’ It is our view that this joint Labour Together, Labour Party and APCO operation was launched because Paul’s factually accurate reporting would have shed light on the highly problematic and unlawful aspects of Sir Keir Starmer’s rise to power.

Fifth, they show that APCO had sent a ‘case summary’ to Josh Simons of Labour Together on the 20th of November 2020, on the basis of which APCO were contracted by Labour Together two days later. The ‘case summary’, setting out a proposed scope of work, clearly identified us as journalists. From the very beginning, therefore, APCO and Labour Together knew that they were looking to investigate journalists – the very journalists who were reporting accurately on Labour Together, Morgan McSweeney and undeclared donations.

Sixth, they show that Simons wrote to an unknown person at the Labour Party in November 2023 asking for ‘intel’ on us. This shows that Simons’ immediate response to announcement of Paul’s book was to seek the assistance of the Labour Party. At the time, we were both Labour Party members. The reply to Simons’ request has been redacted in our documents. We call on the Labour Party to release all documents to us relevant to this scandal, and to confirm whether Josh Simons, Labour Together or APCO were provided with any of our private, personal information.

[Corruption Tracker @ArmsTradeCT]

New Case 🚨 | The Leonardo Panama Affair

https://t.co/Piaazbc2g8

[Tory Fibs @ToryFibs]

MP Barry Gardiner sitting behind the Prime Minister at PMQs with the book “The Fraud” sitting on his lap.