"This manual was designed in order to provide readers with an overview of state of the art practices in investigative journalism, with a focus on illicit financial flows and asset recovery. It has an introductory to intermediate level. It is the result of over three years of collaboration between CiFAR and civil society organizations specialized in various fields of expertise relevant to the practice of journalism, beginning with the launch of our first training and mentoring program Investigate the Meditarranean in 2017. Our Introduction to Investigative Journalism manual aims to cover points that we have identified as being important for investigating grand corruption, financial crime and asset recovery, the main areas of investigative reporting useful for, namely: theoretical and research frameworks, investigative resources for deep web research, databases and access to information, as well as digital safety. Three supporting case-studies have been added as an illustration of the use of these tools and techniques, based on three investigative cross-border stories published by some of our trainees. This last part is designed to provide a “behind-the-scenes” overview of the investigative work of these three journalists that, we hope, will be useful for current and new early career investigative journalists." (About this manual, page 2)