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.
OCCRP senior investigator Tom Stocks shares 10 best practices for tracking the mansions and superyachts of Russian oligarchs and officials deemed closest to President Vladimir Putin.
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.
The criminal blueprint and its elements need to be understood to efficiently follow the money and stop criminals from doing business as usual. Criminals, both the ones just starting out as well as those who are already well established, have regional and global infrastructure that is continuously built and maintained by what the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) team calls the “criminal services industry.” Here’s OCCRP’s Paul Radu on how it works and how to untangle it.
In this excerpt from his new book on protecting democracy, Larry Diamond, founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, outlines 10 steps to combat kleptocracy around the world. Among them is the need to end the use of anonymous shell companies and “increase international support for investigative journalism.”
The jury for the DIG Awards – an annual celebration of the best investigative documentaries made around the world – has revealed the films and programs that have made it onto the annual shortlist. The final awards will be given as part of DIG’s festival, which is taking place in the historic city of Modena in northern Italy this week.
US professor Bruce Bagley was frequently quoted by media outlets as an expert on corruption. But according to federal prosecutors, he also put his expertise into practice. They announced that he was arrested on money laundering charges last week.
