THE BIG READ: How to hide $400m from your wife

When a wealthy businessman set out to divorce his wife, their fortune vanished. The quest to find it would reveal the depths of an offshore financial system bigger than most large economies, writes Nicholas Confessore

A few weeks after she realised her husband was finally leaving her, Sarah Pursglove flew down to the Bahamas to figure out how much money he really had.

Like many women married to very wealthy men, she didn’t know much about the family accounts. Her husband, a Finnish entrepreneur named Robert Oesterlund, had sworn to a Canadian court that his immediately calculable “net family property” totalled just a few million dollars.