Sanctioned but Subsidised: How DATACROS Helped

Public investment can serve as a catalyst for businesses driving positive change. But when business ownership is hidden behind opaque structures and intricate corporate networks, how can we prevent capture of public wealth by individuals or organisations which should not receive it? A recent investigation by IRPI Media, an investigative journalism organisation partner of the DATACROS III and KLEPTOTRACE projects, shows how Transcrime’s advanced technologies support not only competent authorities, but also journalists and civil society in safeguarding transparency, accountability, and ensuring the proper use of public money.

In July 2025, IRPI Media published a detailed inquiry in Italy revealing that several Tuscan wine estates, ultimately controlled by individuals subject to international sanctions, had received substantial funding from EU agricultural and recovery programmes (e.g. NextGenerationEU fund). The investigation, conducted in collaboration with The Insider, employed Transcrime’s DATACROS tools and models and revealed that more than €1 million in public subsidies had flowed over the past decade to a variety of wine companies linked to sanctioned Russian oligarchs.

Among these, some estates received over €100,000 in direct agricultural subsidies under the Common Agricultural Policy, while others secured additional grants nearing €30,000 from NextGenerationEU funds aimed at renewable energy installations such as solar panels. Moreover, the analysis revealed that out of approximately 1000 wine producers in Tuscany, at least 64 are owned through foreign entities that do not disclose the real beneficiaries. In many cases, ownership is hidden behind chains of offshore companies and trusts. This layer of opacity hinders the effective enforcement of regulations. Indeed, the EU requires Member States to ensure that funding is conditional upon the full cooperation of final beneficiaries in protecting the Union’s financial interests. Connections to sanctioned countries and opaque ownership chains are both considered high-risk indicators that should trigger enhanced scrutiny.

To support their inquiry, IRPI Media made use of the investigative and risk-assessment tool DATACROS. The platform enabled journalists to:

• Combine different data, including corporate information, real estate data and other fragmented sources.
• Reconstruct multi-layered corporate structures, often involving foreign jurisdictions with limited transparency.
• Identify links between beneficiaries of EU funds and sanctioned individuals, including indirect forms of control and influence, also building on the tool developed in the ISF-funded KLEPTOTRACE project to trace assets linked to sanctions evasion and transnational high-level corruption.
• Assess the risk of entities and firms thanks to the employment of Transcrime multi-dimensional risk indicators
• Visualise connections across entities and jurisdictions, facilitating the interpretation of hidden networks.

The case illustrates the growing need for automated approaches enabled by data-driven, AI-enhanced tools, like DATACROS, to help combat financial crime, ensure accountability, and protect the integrity of public funding. In an interview to IRPI Media, also the European Business Registry Association (EBRA), a DATACROS partner, emphasised the value of such tools in supporting the work of registers and competent authorities and in complementing the role of official registers.