Method

How to read this site

The tiers

Every claim on this site carries one of five labels. The label is not decoration. It tells you what kind of thing you are reading and what we did to earn it.

LEAD

Nominated or unverified. Being chased.

DOCUMENTED

Primary document read. Citation displayed.

ANALYSIS

Our labeled inference. Falsifiers listed.

REPORTED

Credible secondary reporting. No primary exists or none was reachable.

DEAD

Checked and contradicted. Kept visible so it cannot be reintroduced.

Two phases, two rules

An investigation runs in two phases. Upstream, leads run ahead of the evidence on purpose. That is what a lead is for, and we do not grade a lead by whether it was literally true when first spoken. We grade it by whether it was worth chasing. Downstream, nothing publishes as a fact until a primary document has been opened and read, the passage is quoted, and the reader is named. The rigor is what buys the confidence. It is never a reason to stop hunting.

Not a witch hunt, structurally

Fairness you can point at beats fairness you assert. So: every ANALYSIS claim lists what would prove it wrong. Every claim we killed stays visible with what the document actually shows. Our own corrections are published by name and date. Where an innocent explanation is legitimate, we say so beside our own reading.

What we will not do

We do not accuse a named person of a crime, of dishonesty, or of professional misconduct without a legal review, and we do not assert in our own voice that a named company broke a specific law. We quote regulators and courts accurately and attribute their language to them. Private individuals who bought into a situation without knowing what we later learned are described as exactly that.

Money

Sontara funds this site. Sontara has no editorial say. Ads are labeled, and they never sit next to a claim. No one who works on an investigation here trades any security named in it, before, during, or after publication, and that rule is enforced mechanically by a blocklist that our own trading systems read before every order. When a case names a tradeable security, it goes on the list. It leaves the list ten trading days after the later of our last material publication about the company or the case leaving active status.

Nominations

Anyone can nominate a case. We screen every nomination against three questions, and we publish the questions: Is the harm documentable? Is a legal shell being used to shield the people responsible? Can the central claim be falsified? A case is marked accepted for investigation only after a human decision, not an automatic one.

Data

Public open-source information only. Filings, official instruments, published reports, primary web pages captured with the fetch method recorded. Nothing from any private system, ever.