countries that Unaoil have operated in include Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Kuwait, and the UAE. In March 2016 the Sydney Morning Herald published a letter from a legal representative of Unaoil in which the allegations of corruption and bribery are denied. On 31 March 2016, Monaco authorities announced that they had raided the offices of Unaoil and the homes of some of its executives, following an urgent request for assistance from the SFO. The statement said, "These searches and interviews were carried out in the presence of British officials as part of a vast, international corruption scandal implicating numerous foreign oil industry firms. The information collected is going to be examined by the British authorities as part of their investigation." The UK National Crime Agency carried out their investigation in collaboration with the Australian Federal Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. On 27 February 2017, an article in the News Corp-owned The Australian presented an alternative perspective on the Unaoil bribery scandal. This claimed that the Fairfax Media newspapers had settled claims made against them regarding false allegations and indicated that "within weeks, the publisher will be confronted with yet another legal action, this time from the company at the centre of the allegations that triggered these backdowns. That company is Unaoil, a Monaco-based business that is a player in the international oil industry and is owned by the Ashani family." The article claimed that the leaker of the company emails was an extortionist who had hacked Unaoil, and stated that Unaoil would seek through court to identify the sources for the 2016 articles. The Australian had previously reported Unaoil's denials of the allegations, and accusation that it was the victim of extortion, on 17 May 2016. In November 2016, the UK Treasury announced it was giving the SFO 'blockbuster funding' to resource the agency's Unaoil probe. That same month, a former Unaoil country manager told the BBC's Panorama programme he had bribed a Libyan government official. The whistleblower, Lindsay Mitchell, said that in 2009 he handed an envelope filled with US dollars to a manager at a subsidiary of the state-owned Libyan National Oil Company. In January 2017, the DOJ announced in a statement that Rolls-Royce had agreed to pay a $170 million fine to settle corruption allegations involving its use of several facilitators to win contracts, including Unaoil. Ongoing investigations by the SFO were reported in April