London headquarters at blue hour

UK headquarters · In-country capability across MEA

The source layer for due diligence.

Stop guessing. Start knowing.

Roots Intelligence is a UK-headquartered in-country sourcing firm operating across the Middle East and Africa, for questions automated due diligence cannot resolve.

Engage Roots
52Jurisdictions
240+Verified sources
100+SMEs on call
38Network partners

01 · The gap

The distance between what is searchable and what is true.

Automated due diligence has expanded what can be screened and structured. Across the Middle East and Africa, it still stops short of the answer.

The Roots thesis

“The data layer answers part of the question. The source layer answers the rest.”

03 · About

Built for the questions the record cannot answer.

A · Why Roots exists

Built to close a specific gap.

Roots Intelligence was established to serve one situation: due diligence in jurisdictions where automated tools, registry feeds and adverse-media databases run out of signal before the question has been answered.

Across the Middle East and Africa the corporate record reaches the public domain only partially. Beneficial ownership is often declared rather than verified. Court files and land registries remain, in practice, in-person retrievals. Adverse coverage exists in Arabic, French, Portuguese and local languages that Western platforms index thinly or not at all.

The consequence is that buyers of diligence in these markets were being handed a clean database report and asked to treat it as an answer, when what they actually held was an absence of evidence. Decisions worth hundreds of millions were being taken on the strength of a search that had never reached the record.

Roots exists to supply the layer underneath: vetted in-country sources, compartmented by design, every finding graded and cited, integrated with the data layer rather than sold as a replacement for it.

We are not an alternative to the database. We are the part of the answer the database is unable to reach.

The principles we run on

  1. 01

    Sources, not aggregated data. We reach records, people and places that databases cannot reach.

  2. 02

    Confidentiality by structure. Each source sees only the question they are positioned to answer.

  3. 03

    The difficult MEA jurisdictions. Our network is built for fragmented records and uneven disclosure.

B · The founder

Investigative depth, run as an operation.

Roots Intelligence is led by Mohamed Shams. His practice is enhanced due diligence and corporate investigation across the Middle East and Africa: asset tracing, financial crime, sanctions exposure, and the beneficial-ownership and network structures behind them. He has directed mandates in which the exposure at stake ran into the billions.

That investigative grounding was formed in research and investigative journalism: a discipline that demands independent corroboration, complete attribution, and findings that survive legal review before release. It is the evidentiary standard every Roots report is held to. Each finding is cited, each source graded, and each gap declared rather than absorbed.

The firm's advantage is the second half of that record. He has established and run a regional subsidiary and built vetted in-country partner networks across more than twenty countries, and then engineered the system that governs them: a layered third-party risk platform in which open-source collection, social network analysis and human sourcing resolve into one auditable workflow.

That is what a client is buying: an investigator's judgement about what a finding is worth, delivered through an operator's system for producing it consistently, across fifty-two jurisdictions and at a cost structure that survives procurement.
Enhanced due diligenceAsset tracingFinancial crimeOSINT & HUMINTSocial network analysisNetwork & platform build

Beneath the founder, every region is run by a regional lead: typically a national or long-resident operator with a documented professional record in journalism, law, regulatory work or risk management, accountable for source vetting and operational discipline across the jurisdictions in their region. Within each jurisdiction the lead is supported by analysts with extensive local knowledge of the registries, the languages, the court practice and the context that determines whether a finding holds.

02 · Capabilities

Four ways into the source layer.

Each engagement begins with a defined question, a defensible method and the right level of source access.

01 · Confirm

Verification

Identity, document and corporate-existence verification against in-country authoritative records rather than aggregated feeds.

02 · Investigate

Investigation & asset tracing

Documented mapping of corporate, real-estate and, where lawful, financial assets across one or more jurisdictions.

03 · Monitor

Third-party & supply chain risk

Lifecycle risk management for vendor, supplier and counter-party portfolios, extending into sub-tier supplier investigation.

04 · Access

Expertise on demand

Vetted subject-matter experts for short-form questions, pre-investment review, training and expert support.

04 · The platform

One workflow. Every layer of the source.

Roots is building the platform that makes in-country intelligence behave like infrastructure: open-source collection, social network analysis and vetted human sources resolved into a single auditable workflow.

Case intake · subject · jurisdiction
Layer 01

Open-source collection

Registries, filings, media and public record, structured on intake.

Layer 02

In-country sources

Compartmented enquiries placed with vetted local sources.

Layer 03

Network analysis

Ownership, relationship and control structures mapped as a graph.

Layer 04

Assurance

Grading, corroboration and legal review before release.

One running data log · one audit surface · one consolidated report
01

Multi-layered sourcing

A finding is assembled rather than retrieved, with clear visibility into which layer each conclusion rests on.

02

Cross-border cost efficiency

A multi-jurisdiction case runs as one engagement, with one scope, standard and consolidated report.

03

Operational optimisation

Routine checks are tiered while analyst time remains focused where judgement is required.

African port and logistics corridor from above

03 · Field intelligence

Investigative depth, run as an operation.

A live matter can cross company records, physical presence, local reputation and beneficial ownership. We hold those layers in one controlled workflow, with one scope, one audit trail and one consolidated report.

Registry searchSource enquirySite verificationCorroboration

06 · Coverage

Sourced presence across the Middle East and Africa.

Fifty-two jurisdictions, organised into regional pivots. Thirty-eight are covered by network partners under direct pivot control; the remainder by vetted referral, under the same standards.

05 · Method

Compartmented. Documented. Defensible.

01

Legal review before scoping

We define the lawful question, limits and permitted collection method before work begins.

02

Structural compartmentation

No source sees the full engagement. Access is limited to the question each source can answer.

03

Graded quality assurance

Every source, record and conclusion is graded, corroborated and reviewed before reporting.

Begin an engagement

A clear scope. A direct answer.

Tell us the jurisdiction, the decision you need to make and what the available data has not resolved.

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