Hawala: the bankers of irregular migration

The absence of legal migratory routes towards Europe has raised the importance of entrusted intermediaries that operate through the ‘hawala’ system and serve both as a bank for smugglers
and as an insurer for migrants.

This investigation, which I coordinated and carried out together with journalists Andrés Mourenza,
Iliana Papangeli, Andrea Giambartolomei, Priyanka Shankar and Emma Yeomans, was supported by a grant from the IJ4EU fund and by Journalismfund Europe. It was short-listed for the 2023 Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize for Journalism)and honorable mention at the TRACE Prize for Investigative Reporting),and was published in the following outlets:

El País

The traditional ‘hawala’ money transfer system provides financial services to human traffickers and migrants on dangerous journeys to the EU and the UK (in Spanish and in English)

Here pdf of Spanish version:

The difficulty of chasing money from irregular migration that leaves no trace (in Spanish)

Why people migrate from Iraki Kurdistan (in Spanish)

Solomon, in English and Greek

This article was short-listed for the 2023 Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize for Journalism

lavialibera, in Italian

The Times, in English (text) and podcast

Pado magazine, in South Korean

VoxEurop: in German and in French

Interview to me about the project