The Bureau of Investigative Journalism - Roman AbramovicH
How do you turn a story about billions of dollars, offshore companies, hedge funds and an incredibly complex trail of money into something people can understand visually?
That was our starting point for this project with The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
The investigation looked into Roman Abramovich’s vast offshore investment network and evidence suggesting that companies registered in the British Virgin Islands may have been managed from the UK, potentially leaving him liable for as much as £1bn in UK tax and penalties.
Our job was to find a visual way into that complexity.
Rather than trying to illustrate every financial connection, we focused on the bigger story behind them: money travelling through layers of companies, jurisdictions and investments, the people controlling those movements, and the enormous wealth sitting at the centre of it all.
We developed two original collages, bringing together portraits, financial references, documents, locations and graphic elements to create a world where everything feels connected, but not immediately transparent. Layers conceal other layers, relationships emerge between seemingly separate elements, and the complexity of the financial network becomes part of the visual language itself.
As we developed the collages, we were already thinking about how this visual world could work in motion. The animation became a natural extension of the same idea, allowing connections to appear gradually, money to travel and different parts of the story to reveal themselves over time.
Every new project that lands on our desks brings us into a world we may know very little about at first, and that is something we are always curious about. With this one, we found ourselves following offshore companies, financial structures and trails of money, trying to understand how all those invisible connections worked before finding a way to make them visible.
The more we understood the story, the more the visual idea began to take shape. The collages and animation developed alongside that understanding, each helping us work out how much to reveal, what to connect and what to leave for the journalism itself to explain.
Two illustrations and one animation became our visual response to a story about an enormous financial network built around layers, connections and the question of where control really sat.
A complicated story, translated into a visual one.
