Evidence & audit
Where every number comes from, and what could not be verified
This work was audited against itself: 292 checkable claims traced to source, 73
derived figures independently recomputed, and five adversarial reviewers across four AI labs
instructed to destroy it. The defects they found are listed here rather than buried.
0.00%Confirmed fabrications across 292 claims
6Model bugs found and fixed
10Overclaims corrected
60%Of model inputs that are judgement, not evidence
Primary sources
- Trade: Maldives Customs Service transaction-level import declarations 2018–2026 — 11,069 chapter-33 line items with HS-10 code, consignment country, quantity, CIF value and applied duty rate. Cross-validated against UN Comtrade Korea-reported mirror data to 1.3%.
- Tariff: Maldives National Tariff 2026, 501 pp., extracted by coordinate so each HS-10 code maps to its own MFN, SAFTA and CMFTA rate.
- Law: gazetted instruments — Companies Act 7/2023, Foreign Investments Act 11/2024 and Annex I entry requirements, Income Tax Act 25/2019, GST Act 10/2011, Export-Import Act 31/79, Import Prohibition Act 4/75, Food Safety Act 6/2024, Medicine Regulation 2026/R-64, Employment Act 2/2008, Consumer Protection Act 12/2020.
- Costs: published STELCO, MWSC, MPL and Dhiraagu tariffs; Bank of Maldives merchant terms; 48 live commercial rent listings; 45 advertised salary postings.
- Market: 911 live shelf prices scraped from Maldivian K-beauty storefronts across 112 brands; competitor profiles; published wholesale terms from ten B2B channels.
The corrections that mattered
Six model bugs
1. Payroll charged an extra month's salary instead of the flat MVR 3,000 Ramadan allowance the research had verified. 2. Card merchant fees were charged on wholesale revenue, which is invoiced on 35-day credit. 3. Store 1's fit-out capex and rent deposit were never charged at all — MVR 674,505 of spend that simply never happened, because the trigger condition could never be true for a store opening in month 1. 4. Working-capital overrides were silently inert, so every stock-cover and supplier-credit sensitivity was meaningless. 5 and 6. Two arithmetic slips in published tables — a MVR 1,000 sum and an FX conversion using 15.4173 instead of 15.42.
The first three all pushed the same way: they overstated costs, so the published figures understated performance. The balance sheet still tied throughout — an absent transaction never unbalances anything, which is exactly why a tie is not proof of correctness.
Ten overclaims
The most consequential was in the opening sentence of the deck: “Not one formal retail chain in the country stocks a Korean brand.” The six chains verified — grocery, pharmacy, duty-free — genuinely carry none, but Le Cute, the country's leading prestige beauty retailer, already stocks Medicube and Round Lab. The claim was too broad and is now narrowed.
Others: describing agreement with the Maldives Monetary Authority's series as independent corroboration, when MMA sources its trade data from Customs; presenting a modelled FX path as a forecast; and a balance-sheet reconciliation of MVR 0.000000 quoted as though it validated the assumptions rather than the code.
What could not be verified
- No published Korea→Malé freight rate exists. Every rate tool is quote-gated for this lane. The figure used is derived from proxy lanes and product value density.
- Retail fit-out per square foot is unknowable from public sources — no Maldivian tender publishes both a value and an area. 78% of the estimate is budget, not quote.
- Footfall and conversion for a Malé commercial street are not published anywhere. The transactions-a-day figure is calibrated to a defensible market share, not observed.
- Private Maldivian company accounts are not public and never will be — there is no filing requirement. Competitor revenue is bounded only by statutory SME classification bands.
- The Malé Building Use Permit fee is not published, though the permit is mandatory and actively enforced.
- Whether a shop fascia counts as an “advertisement board” under Malé Regulation 2016/R-25 is ambiguous. Priced conservatively as though it does — MVR 2,400 a month per store.
- Unit weights in the buying list are largely estimated. They drive the entire margin calculation and must be confirmed from supplier packing lists before any order is placed.
Dated risks
23 October 2026. Medicine Regulation 2026/R-64 makes it an offence for general traders to import or stock “products containing a medicinal substance” without authority permission — MVR 10,000 to 100,000, with port seizure and destruction. The governing phrase is undefined in the regulation. The regulator's own decision tree defers to country-of-origin classification, so Korean functional cosmetics remain cosmetics here unless marketed differently — which makes claim discipline a compliance control, not a marketing preference.