A restructuring is announced as debt relief. The schedule attached to it pays the advisers before the pension fund. Both facts are public, published months apart, in documents nobody reads together.
Emerging markets can make people better off, and often do. Whether a particular deal does comes down to who wrote its terms, and the people those terms are supposed to reach are usually the ones with least say in them: the saver whose fund was told by rule to buy, the taxpayer standing behind the guarantee, the household on the grid the tender was for.
Sometimes the gain reaches them. Sometimes it goes somewhere else, and the reason is sitting in a document that was filed, published, and read by nobody who stood to lose.
That is what this site is for.
What we track
The deals that move public money in emerging and frontier markets: sovereign debt restructurings, mining and energy concessions, port and free-zone contracts, pension rules that oblige funds to buy, tax changes sold as reform. Decisions taken in public, by institutions that publish, and usually read once and then left alone.
The Board
Everything those deals run through gets a file: governments and countries, lenders and institutions, investors and companies, the journalists who cover them and the outlets they write for, and the issues the deals turn on.
A file holds what the party did, when, what each of those facts rests on, how we read the record, and every change we have made to that reading since the file was opened. Where two files touch the same deal, the Board draws the line between them. A connection is a fact about the deal, not an accusation.
The tag is one word, measured against whether the deal reached the people it was meant to reach. What each one asserts is set out in the methodology.
Why journalists are on it
Coverage is part of how these deals get done. When eleven articles about a privatisation carry the same figures from the same briefing note, that is a fact about the deal, and it belongs on the Board beside the parties.
What a thin file means
Some files are thin. A file is thin because the record is thin, and it says so rather than filling the gap with inference. Most deals are ordinary, most parties are doing their jobs, and a site that tagged everything would be worth nothing.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it on the page, dated, with what it said before. Every correction is listed on the corrections page, and the contact page has the addresses.