Documents from the Cyprus Confidential project shed light for the first time on vast swathes of the financial infrastructure built around Intellexa and its founder, Tal Dilian, an Israeli-Cypriot, with the small island of Cyprus as its nerve center. They reveal an empire founded on the illegal sale of particularly intrusive surveillance technologies, in the middle of Europe.

Intellexa is the umbrella for several discreet cyber-surveillance companies but is best known for its Predator surveillance software, capable of absorbing all the data on a cellphone. The company is currently the subject of numerous investigations for having supplied invasive surveillance tools to authoritarian regimes (Sudan, Vietnam, Egypt or even Madagascar, as recently revealed by Mediapart), sometimes outside any legal framework. Its software has also been used in Europe for illegal surveillance, notably targeting journalists and elected opposition representatives in Greece. The group is also a major supplier of other surveillance tools, including IMSI-catchers.

The documents consulted by Le Monde and its partners, including financial statements, emails and invoices, show that Dilian did not restrict his innovations to the technical sphere: He was also creative in tax matters. In addition to the scandal surrounding the illegal eavesdropping carried out using his flagship software in Greece, these files provide a picture that seems to confirm the suspicions of the European Public Prosecutor's Office, which suspects him of having engaged in large-scale tax evasion, according to the news outlet Euractiv.

The records analyzed for Cyprus Confidential represent only part of Intellexa's "web," since they do not contain the financial information of the group's subsidiaries that develop Predator spyware. However, they helped identify dozens of shell companies in several European countries as well as in Hong Kong and the British Virgin Islands. More broadly, they show how Dilian did everything in his power to conceal the nature of his activities and evade taxes, taking advantage of the passivity of Cypriot and European investigators.

Alerts from accounting firms

One person appears to be central to this vast scheme: Sara Hamou, Dilian's partner. A lawyer specializing in setting up companies abroad, Hamou holds a whole series of key positions in companies selling Intellexa products or providing services to it. She sits on the board of a dozen companies and is described in the European Parliament report on cyber-surveillance software as "a central figure in [Intellexa's] intricate network of companies."

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