Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://archive.gijn.org/tag/offshore-havens/)
From the Pandora Papers to massive “laundromat” exposes, we are witnessing the era of massive leaks exposing financial corruption. But how do you go from a leaked thumb drive to a global exposé of shadowy money? Three of the best sleuths at tracking businesses and investments hidden around the world — who were all part of the Pandora Papers team — offered lessons at GIJC21.
Can the worst of times for media and political freedoms in post-Soviet Russia also be the best of times for watchdog reporting? Elizaveta Osetinskyaya, the editor of Forbes Russia, the most prominent business magazine in that country, seemed to think so.
About a third of all countries in the world now require officials to publicly disclose their assets. Institutions like the World Bank and the OECD see this as a good thing. Asset declarations, they say, are crucial tools for fighting corruption and holding officials accountable. As an investigative journalist in the Philippines, I found asset statements vital to digging into conflicts of interest and the illegal accumulation of wealth by those in public office. But pushback on official disclosures is coming from an unlikely quarter.
It’s certainly one of the single biggest leaks of documents in the history of investigative reporting. Over the last 15 months, 86 journalists in 46 countries have been poring over a cache of 2.5 million documents on offshore holdings obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. ICIJ coordinated the investigation from DC, using a secure messaging system to communicate with a worldwide team of journalists and free-text retrieval software and programmers on three continents to mine the information from the documents.