Interview
The network effect

Protesting corruption in Bucharest, Romania, July 2023. (Photo by Daniel Mihailescu/AFP via Getty Images)

Kleptocrats, corrupt officials, and organized crime networks frequently hide, launder, and spend their ill-gotten gains across multiple countries and legal jurisdictions. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) is an investigative media group that attacks this problem by connecting journalists and media outlets across borders and areas of expertise, thereby allowing them to work together to follow the money. Recently, OCCRP’s Editor-in-Chief, Miranda Patrucic, spoke with the George W. Bush Institute’s Jessica Ludwig and Jonathan Tepperman about how journalists can use networks as a force multiplier to penetrate and expose transnational corruption and organized crime.

What is OCCRP and how does it work?

We’re a platform for many different organizations to come together and work on investigative reporting. We also support media around the world. We help with research and data, but also with something that is really important, especially for investigative journalists, which is safety. We provide physical security, digital security, and training. Finally, we are also a media-development organization. We go to places where there are very few or no investigative journalists, and we train them from the bottom up.

Why was OCCRP created and what problem does it try to solve?

Many years ago, Drew Sullivan, an American, went to Bosnia to teach journalists there. He quickly discovered that the country had a big problem with the trafficking of girls from Romania and began looking deeper into the issue. Before long, he met a Romanian named Paul Radu. Paul impressed the hell out of Drew, because Paul actually went and met with the girls, met with the traffickers. And they both quickly realized that they needed the other to complete the story. A lot of journalists think that they need to be lone wolves. But Drew and Paul saw that if they worked together, they could write a story that neither of them could do on their own. That’s where the idea for OCCRP came from: two people realizing that they needed each other. From there, OCCRP grew by other reporters coming to them and saying, “Hey, I need help in this place,” “Hey, I need help in that place.”

Being a lone-wolf reporter is difficult, especially when it comes to cross-border crime. A lot of journalists are experts on their own countries, but when they cross a border, they don’t know the territory or how to get the information they need. They might not speak the language or have the contacts. We help them find a trusted colleague to partner with.

I think it’s really changed the face of journalism. Our approach is much more effective. Sometimes it’s even more effective than law enforcement. Think about the case of a prosecutor from Bosnia who needs help tracking something down in Romania; they have to clear so many bureaucratic hurdles before they can even ask a simple question, such as, “Does this person own that company?” Whereas I can just pick up the phone and get an answer five minutes later.

A demonstration against the detention of a journalist, Skopje, North Macedonia, Jan. 2015. (Photo by Robert Atanasovski/AFP via Getty Images)

Is it difficult to get journalists and media companies to overcome their reflexive objections to cooperating?

It comes naturally in eastern Europe because everything in journalism there is scarce: the resources, the number of people, and so on. Cooperation is much more difficult in the West, especially the United States, where everybody’s looking for a scoop. There’s so much ego involved, and if one publication breaks a piece of news, other publications won’t want to follow up, so sometimes stories end up dying when they actually shouldn’t. What makes things easier in our part of the world is that there are a multitude of languages. Nobody is trying to out-scoop anybody else, because everyone has their own audience. The story is all that matters. It’s not about individual journalists, it’s not about our ego, it’s not about who knows about us. The impact is what matters.

Were there obstacles to overcome when you started interacting with law enforcement?

One groundbreaking thing that OCCRP has done, which is still considered controversial, is establish a partnership with Transparency International that we call the Global Anti-Corruption Consortium (GACC). It’s very difficult for us to share information directly with law enforcement, outside of what we publish. The GACC allows us to share information with Transparency International, which can then work directly with law enforcement. We share our information, our documents, and then TI decides what to do with them. In some instances, they might submit the case to the police or a prosecutor. In other cases, they use it to lobby for a change in the law. But not everyone in the media sphere thinks such cooperation is a good idea.

Another thing OCCRP does is conduct training with law enforcement and organize conferences bringing law enforcement and journalists together. Why do we do that? Because in journalism, you have to constantly learn. In order to uncover a crime, you need to understand how the crime works. That means understanding the new things that criminals are doing. So you need to learn what is going on from people in different industries. If you’re talking about investigating illegal money, for example, you need to talk to law enforcement and criminals.

How does OCCRP measure success?

The obvious way is by tracking the people jailed and the amount of money seized. Between 2009 and 2022, we counted over $10 billion in money either seized or levied in fines. Our work has led to the launch of 398 official investigations, 621 indictments, arrests, or sentences, and 131 resignations and sackings.

I also look at the reactions. So sometimes I see impact in things like the reporter getting called an “enemy of the state” for the work they have done.

Journalists protesting in Pristina, Kosovo, Jul. 31, 2023. (Photo by Ferdi Limani/Getty Images)

Finally, I look at the journalists. There are so few investigative reporters out there. Increasing the number of these journalists around the world, making sure they get the tools they need, the resources, the support – that’s an even more important impact for OCCRP. It means that these people are able to publish stories in their own countries, despite all kinds of attempts by governments to shut down independent media.

Has OCCRP faced legal or security challenges because of the stories it’s published?

We deal with a lot of security threats, both physical and digital, and we put a lot of effort into dealing with them. In the places where we work, journalists get killed; they get harassed by law enforcement; they get threatened a lot. I myself got death threats for a story I reported in Montenegro many years ago. So one of our big successes is the extent to which we’ve been able to keep our reporters safe.

What about legal challenges?

Lawsuits are a huge issue for us. Across our network, we have had to deal with about 50 of them. [OCCRP Co-Founder] Paul Radu was personally sued in London for an exposé I wrote about a multibillion-dollar effort to illegally move funds out of Azerbaijan. The whole legal process is really costly, something that most media organizations cannot afford. Fortunately, we have pro bono legal representation. If we didn’t, I don’t know how we would be able to defend ourselves. But it’s still very costly.

Another problem with lawsuits is that you become subject to discovery, which means that you have to surrender all your devices and all your material, which creates a massive threat to your ability to protect your sources. Lawsuits are the easiest way for people to harass journalists, because the amount of time that you have to spend defending yourself is tremendous, and that’s time you could be spending doing investigations.

But we’re doing what we can to protect ourselves and our journalists. OCCRP has an editorial system; every story we publish goes through three or four edits. We have a very rigorous fact-checking process; when I was a reporter, it often felt like I was being interrogated by the police. We check every single word in every article. As a result, we have been asked to make very, very few corrections. That, and the fact that we’ve never lost a lawsuit, speaks to our journalism.

The business environment for media organizations has been under strain for some time now. How is OCCRP able to keep publishing such complex, multi-jurisdictional, cross-border stories, of the kind that fewer and fewer media outlets have the capacity to handle these days?

One, we do have a good level of funding. I wouldn’t say it’s tremendous, but we work in places that are not super expensive. Having 10 journalists working in eastern Europe is very different than having 10 journalists based in the United States.

The other thing I want to say is that, even if they were not paid any money, most of the reporters I know on the ground would do what they’re doing anyway, because they believe in it so much. They’re a fearless bunch who are really passionate about their articles and about fighting corruption. And they don’t see their work as a job; it’s a calling. Because of that, they’re able to really dig into stories that very few other people would touch.

If we face a legal risk, we think about mitigating it, but we never think about not doing a story for that reason. The same thing with security. If there’s a security risk, we will just work harder to find a way to do the story as safely as we can.

What big challenges still lie ahead in the fight against international corruption?

There are a lot. There are still so many places in the world where there are very few trained journalists and a lot of lone wolves working under very difficult circumstances. In a lot of places, governments are using either privacy regulations or just straight-up depriving journalists of access to information. It’s difficult to shine a light if you don’t have access to information. Then there are the security challenges, even in places like the United States. Training investigative editors is a big challenge, and you need them to lead reporters in uncovering corruption.

You also need to expand the kind of collaboration we do with Transparency International to all kinds of sectors. You need to have journalists and environmental organizations cooperating. You need to have human rights organizations and journalists cooperating in a more meaningful way. You need to have this kind of communication across all platforms and sectors.