Tool: Malign Finance

The funding of foreign political parties, candidates, campaigns, well-connected elites, or politically influential groups, often through non-transparent structures designed to obfuscate ties to a nation state or its proxies. 

Cases of malign finance are included if they are perpetrated by individuals, entities, or proxies, such as purportedly independent banks or businesspeople, with links to the Russian or Chinese governments or their ruling parties. Cases included are representative examples of how malign finance undermines democratic institutions or processes by surreptitiously influencing political debate, decision-making, electoral outcomes, and societal cohesion. 

 NOTE: This project does not seek to catalog every allegation of corruption in specific countries. Rather, the entries gathered for this Tracker provide a representative sample of the methods used by the Russian and Chinese governments and their proxies to fund interference in transatlantic democracies