
GIJC23
Following the Money, from Laundromats to Central Banks
How did three reporters investigate complex financial stories featuring Nigerian billionaires, Eurasian oligarchs, and the head of Lebanon’s central bank?
How did three reporters investigate complex financial stories featuring Nigerian billionaires, Eurasian oligarchs, and the head of Lebanon’s central bank?
The vast majority of people who own properties are not engaged in any misconduct or possible criminal behavior. But land deals or real estate purchases made with inexplicable funding sources can be a telltale sign of corruption.
Investigative journalists have long used information about airplanes to uncover corruption, follow wars, track government officials, and point out the levels of greenhouse gases emitted. GIJN has now revised and updated its reporting guide to planespotting and tracking flights around the world.
Pavla Holcová is an investigative journalist and founder of the Czech Centre for Investigative Journalism, an independent outlet that does cross-border investigations on organized crime and its impact on the Czech Republic (Czechia) and Slovakia.
There is one key reason why reporters should start learning about cryptocurrencies, according to the OCCRP’s Jan Strozyk, and that is because their investigative targets are already using them to hide their crimes and finance their future operations.
To share investigative best practices and other lessons learned from our most recent conference, GIJC21, we are releasing a series of videos from the event’s many seminars, panels, and workshops. The first installment in this series focuses on how investigative reporters can better dig into organized crime and corruption around the world.
Three experts who contributed to GIJN’s new organized crime reporting guide have shared insights into the modus operandi of criminal syndicates and how journalists can deploy cross-border collaborations to expose their illicit activities.
In concert with GIJC21’s panel on the “New Organized Crime,” GIJN has released a comprehensive, multi-part reporting guide to investigating organized crime around the world, looking at nine key areas: criminal finance, narcotics, arms trade, environmental crime, forced disappearances, cybercrime, mafia states, human trafficking, and art and antiquities.
National laws that govern arms dealing are uneven, contradictory, influenced by corrupted leadership, and rife with loopholes. Other barriers to exposing the weapons trade range from maritime and aviation secrecy concealing the transportation of arms; corporate entities that shield dealers and operators; the role of neighboring countries as conduits, and a barter system that allows one illicit commodity, such as ivory, to be exchanged for another.
Networks of business interests, government officials, and criminal groups run illegal operations that harm the environment in multiple ways. They drive worldwide illegal trafficking in wildlife and seafood, timber, minerals, hazardous waste, and toxic chemicals. Such environmental crimes are sometimes connected with other criminal activity, such as drug trafficking and money laundering.