Registry filings and trust documentation, annotated by Maya Hartley for her own working file, never published in this form because, in her own words in the margin, "nobody who isn't already convinced reads a spreadsheet." Reproduced here as she kept it.

Structure 1 — Isle of Man

Holding entity: a discretionary trust, settled fourteen years prior to the events of this account, beneficiaries described only as "such persons as the trustees shall from time to time determine." Entirely lawful. Entirely ordinary, by the standards of a jurisdiction that exists, in large part, to make exactly this kind of ordinariness available to anyone able to afford the setup cost.

Maya's margin note: Nothing here is a smoking gun on its own. This is what makes it work. Every single piece of this, examined alone, is boring. It's only boring together, in the right order, that it stops being boring.

Structure 2 — Jersey

Holding entity: a private investment company, sole director a professional trustee firm, ultimate beneficial ownership declared, per the jurisdiction's minimum disclosure requirement, only to the extent legally required — which is to say, not to the public, and not, in practice, to anyone without a court order or a very patient registry search.

Maya's margin note: Three weeks to get this far. Two dead ends. One helpful clerk who probably shouldn't have been as helpful as she was, and who I have never named anywhere, in print or otherwise, because I promised her I wouldn't and I intend to keep that promise for the rest of both our lives.

Structure 3 — British Virgin Islands

Holding entity: a company limited by shares, registered agent listed, directors listed as two further corporate entities rather than named individuals — a structure sometimes called, informally, "corporate directors," used lawfully by thousands of ordinary businesses and, considerably less ordinarily, by a much smaller number of people with very specific reasons not to want their own name on a public register.

Maya's margin note: This is the layer that took the longest. This is also the layer where the minority stake sits — the one linking back, through two further steps I won't reproduce in full here because they involve a source I've promised anonymity to, to a family trust the public record eventually, painstakingly, connects to Roland Kessler.

Structure 4 — Faith and Nation's declared funding (public filing, UK charity register)

Declared income sources: "individual donations," "corporate partnerships," "grant funding from aligned organisations." No further breakdown required or provided.

Maya's margin note: This is the one that actually surprised me. Not that the money was hidden — charities aren't required to disclose this level of detail, and most of them have entirely legitimate reasons for that. What surprised me was finding the same shell layer, structure 3 above, sitting underneath both this charity's largest declared donor and Kessler's own American lobbying vehicle. Two organisations that would each, publicly, describe themselves as having nothing whatsoever to do with the other. Funded, several careful steps down, from the same account.

Structure 5 — the fourth donor, added after the piece ran

Holding entity: a fifth thread Maya found only after publication, when a reader wrote in with a lead she'd missed entirely — a smaller trust, sitting alongside the others, whose ultimate beneficiary turned out, after another fortnight's work, to be a serving MP's own family charity, entirely legal, entirely undisclosed beyond the minimum required, and entirely coincidental to everything else on this page in every way except the register agent both structures happened to share.