The Veritas Brief

Poland's biggest crypto exchange claimed 1.3 million customers and 4,500 bitcoin. The ledger showed 0.086. Both of the men who ran it are missing. In March 2022, founder Sylwester Suszek drove to a fuel depot outside Katowice and never returned. His family received ransom demands payable in bitcoin. His lawyer, Przemysław Kral, took over — and spent heavily on football sponsorships, the Polish...

Venezuela pumps more oil than it has in a decade. Its minimum wage buys twenty-seven cents a month. We trace where the money goes, and who actually controls it. On 3 January 2026, American special forces took Nicolás Maduro out of a Caracas military compound. His deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, took power two days later. Since then Venezuelan crude output has passed 1.1 million barrels a day, and Washing...

Ukraine can build $55 billion of weapons in 2026. Its own budget will fund roughly $10 billion. In four years Ukraine turned a hollowed-out Soviet legacy sector into Europe's fastest-innovating defense industrial base. Drone output went from roughly 3,000 units in 2022 to about 4.5 million in 2025. Ministry figures put capacity growth at fiftyfold. Then the problem inverted. Ukraine once lacke...

Russia now pays 1.65 million rubles — more than a year's average wage — for a single military contract. And recruitment just hit a three-year low. So what happens when the Kremlin stops buying soldiers and starts taking them? Everyone is watching for a Russian mobilization this October, straight after the State Duma elections. Almost all of the coverage treats it as a military question. We thi...

On 20 January 2029, Donald Trump leaves the White House. The Twenty-Second Amendment sends him home, and a political party finds out what it actually is. Most coverage of this asks who comes next. We think that question is too small. The harder one runs underneath it: what survives when the organising principle walks out the door? In this episode we examine four fault lines. One. The party became...

Apollo agreed to buy easyJet at 715p a share. The board said yes. The founder said yes. The market still won't pay it. On 6 August 2026, Apollo Global Management won a ten-week bidding war for easyJet, valuing the airline at roughly £5.7 billion. Castlelake withdrew. The board recommended the offer unanimously. Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou backed it and elected to roll his family's entire 15.3...

Twenty years after Roberto Calvi was found hanging under a London bridge, forensic experts looked at his hands — and found no trace of the bricks he was supposed to have carried. In the final part of our special investigation into Banco Ambrosiano, we follow "God's Banker" through his last nine days: the desperate letter to Pope John Paul II, the missing $1.4 billion, and his flight...

On a single day, the Vatican Bank signed two letters. One told international lenders the money was good. The other, handed over in private, said the exact opposite. In Part Three of our special investigation into Banco Ambrosiano, we open up the machine. We walk down through the offshore structure that made the fraud possible — a Luxembourg holding company, banks in Switzerland, the Bahamas and Pe...

A lawyer is shot on his doorstep hours after briefing investigators. A financier dies drinking poisoned coffee in his prison cell. And police raid a villa to find a secret list of 962 names reaching into the top of the Italian state. In Part Two of our special investigation into Banco Ambrosiano, we meet the three men Roberto Calvi chose to stand beside: Michele Sindona, the Sicilian financier who...

A meticulous banker vanishes from Italy. Nine days later, he's found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London, his pockets stuffed with cash and bricks. They called him "God's Banker." In Part One of this special investigation, we stand under the bridge where the official "suicide" verdict quietly fell apart, go back to 1896 and the founding of a Catholic bank named...

Ukraine just forced out its top general in the largest protests of the war — and replaced him with a 43-year-old tank commander they call "The Flying BMP." In this episode we go inside the crisis that made Mykhailo Drapatyi commander-in-chief: the reshuffle that dropped reformist defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov, the street revolt that followed, and the clash of two visions for how Ukra...

Last year, 8 San Francisco homes sold for at least a million dollars over asking. This year, that number is 144 — and the two companies most responsible, OpenAI and Anthropic, haven't even gone public yet. In this episode, we follow the money into San Francisco's housing market. Two AI labs headquartered in the city are racing toward trillion-dollar IPOs. Their employees are already turnin...

Europe will finally build its own ATACMS missiles — on German soil. The catch? Washington still holds the export sign-off. That's the autonomy paradox at the heart of NATO's 2026 Ankara summit. In this episode of The Veritas Brief, we follow the money through more than €50 billion in new arms deals. We unpack the Lockheed Martin–Rheinmetall missile pact, Europe's rearmament boom, and t...

Reinsurers cut catastrophe prices by up to 25% on 1 July. American homeowners still pay 46% more than in 2021. Both facts describe the same warming atmosphere. We read the July 2026 renewal reports, the Munich Re and Swiss Re loss data, and EIOPA's protection-gap dashboard, and we follow the money from a Bermudian balance sheet to a renewal notice in Altadena. Why does the reinsurance market c...

First Abu Dhabi Bank reported a two percent profit decline in Q1. But beneath the headline was a much deeper story: war risk, oil volatility, the Strait of Hormuz, liquidity pressure, capital discipline, and the role of sovereign power behind one of the Gulf’s most important banks. In this episode of The Veritas Brief , we explain why FAB’s quarter was not simply weak or strong — but a case study...

Britain didn't crash out of the European Union. It leaked — slowly, quietly, for ten years. A decade on from the referendum, the argument about Brexit has moved from prophecy to forensics, and the evidence is finally in. In this episode, we follow the money through the slow subtraction: the contested GDP estimates, ranging from the OBR's 4% to Stanford's 6–8%; the trade friction that t...

A far-right party polling at 38% — the highest in its history. A governing coalition built to keep one man out, now sitting on a trapdoor. And a country in its third straight year of recession. In this episode of the Veritas Brief, we ask what a Herbert Kickl chancellorship would actually mean — for Austria, for its economy, and for a European Union it sits at the very heart of. We unpack the aust...

The largest IPO in history made Elon Musk a paper trillionaire overnight. The stock popped 19% on day one. A rocket launched an hour before the opening bell. And almost nobody read the document underneath it all. In this episode of Veritas Brief, we turn the volume down on the spectacle and reads the SpaceX S-1: a company valued at more than 100x sales, a "space" business that loses mone...

Russia didn't collapse after 2022 — and the Kremlin never stops saying so. But beneath the stocked supermarket shelves and the headline GDP figures, independent economists describe something slower and far more dangerous: a war machine consuming the very foundations it stands on. In this episode of The Veritas Brief, we go beneath Russia's surface stability to the structural crisis its own...

Germany’s far-right AfD is no longer just a protest movement. It is now leading national polls, gaining historic strength in eastern Germany, and moving closer to real political power. In this episode of Veritas Brief, a slow-journalism podcast by Veritas Europaea , we examine what the AfD’s rise could mean not only for Germany, but for Europe and the wider global economy. This is not only a story...