The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Inc. (ICIJ), is an independent global network of 280 investigative journalists and over 140 media organizations spanning more than 100 countries. It is based in Washington, D.C. with personnel in Australia, France, Spain, Hungary, Serbia, Belgium and Ireland. The ICIJ was launched in 1997 by American journalist Charles Lewis as an initiative of the

Center for Public Integrity The Center for Public Integrity (CPI) is an American nonprofit investigative journalism organization whose stated mission is "to reveal abuses of power, corruption and dereliction of duty by powerful public and private institutions in order to ...

, with the aim of exposing international crime and corruption. In 2017, it became a fully independent organization and was later granted

501(c)(3) nonprofit A 501(c)(3) organization is a United States corporation, trust, unincorporated association or other type of organization exempt from federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of Title 26 of the United States Code. It is one of the 29 types of 501 ...

status. The

Panama Papers The Panama Papers ( es, Papeles de Panamá) are 11.5 million leaked documents (or 2.6 terabytes of data) that were published beginning on April 3, 2016. The papers detail financial and attorney–client information for more than 214,488 ...

were the result of a collaboration with the German newspaper ' and more than 100 other media partners, with journalists spending a year sifting through 11.5 million leaked files from the

Panama Panama ( , ; es, link=no, Panamá ), officially the Republic of Panama ( es, República de Panamá), is a transcontinental country spanning the southern part of North America and the northern part of South America. It is bordered by Co ...

-based law firm

Mossack Fonseca Mossack Fonseca & Co. () was a Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider. The set of confidential financial and legal documents included detailed information on more than 14,000 clients and more than 214,000 offshore entities, revealing the identities of shareholders and directors including noted personalities and heads of state— government officials, close relatives and associates of various heads of government of more than 40 other countries. ' first received the released data from an anonymous source in 2015. After working on the Mossack Fonseca documents for a year, ICIJ director

Gerard Ryle Gerard Ryle (born 1965) is an Irish-Australian investigative reporter who has written on subjects including politics, financial and medical scandals, and police corruption. From 2011, he has been director of the International Consortium of Inve ...

described how the offshore firm had "helped companies and individuals with tax havens, including those that have been sanctioned by the U.S. and UK for dealing with Syrian President

Bashar al-Assad Bashar Hafez al-Assad, ', Levantine pronunciation: ; (, born 11 September 1965) is a Syrian politician who is the 19th president of Syria, since 17 July 2000. In addition, he is the commander-in-chief of the Syrian Armed Forces and the ...

." The ICIJ helped bring about the Corporate Transparency Act in the United States. The Enablers Act, included in the annual defense bill, was first proposed shortly after ICIJ's

Pandora Papers The Pandora Papers are 11.9 million leaked documents with 2.9 terabytes of data that the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published beginning on 3 October 2021. The leak exposed the secret offshore accounts of ...

investigation exposed widespread exploitation of lax financial disclosure rules in the U.S. Governments have recovered more than US$1.36 billion in taxes as a result of the Panama Papers project alone, and some continue to collect lost tax revenue.

History

In 1997, the Center for Public Integrity began creating the consortium. By 2000, the ICIJ consisted of 75 investigative reporters in 39 countries." In early November 2014, the ICIJ's Luxembourg Leaks investigation revealed that

Luxembourg Luxembourg ( ; lb, Lëtzebuerg ; french: link=no, Luxembourg; german: link=no, Luxemburg), officially the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, ; french: link=no, Grand-Duché de Luxembourg ; german: link=no, Großherzogtum Luxemburg is a small lan ...

under

Jean-Claude Juncker Jean-Claude Juncker (; born 9 December 1954) is a Luxembourgish politician who served as the 21st Prime Minister of Luxembourg from 1995 to 2013 and 12th President of the European Commission from 2014 to 2019. He also served as Finance Minister ...

's premiership had turned into a major European centre of corporate

tax avoidance Tax avoidance is the legal usage of the tax regime in a single territory to one's own advantage to reduce the amount of tax that is payable by means that are within the law. A tax shelter is one type of tax avoidance, and tax havens are jurisdi ...

. In February 2015, the ICIJ website released information about bank accounts in

Switzerland ). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...

under the title ''

Swiss Leaks Swiss Leaks (or SwissLeaks) is the name of a journalistic investigation, released in February 2015, of a giant tax evasion scheme allegedly operated with the knowledge and encouragement of the British multinational bank HSBC via its Swiss subsi ...

: Murky Cash Sheltered by Bank Secrecy,'' which published information on 100,000 clients and their accounts at

HSBC HSBC Holdings plc is a British multinational universal bank and financial services holding company. It is the largest bank in Europe by total assets ahead of BNP Paribas, with US$2.953 trillion as of December 2021. In 2021, HSBC had $10.8 tr ...

. In February 2017, ICIJ was spun off into a fully independent organisation, which is governed by three committees: a board of directors, an Advisory Committee, and the ICIJ Network Committee. ICIJ was granted nonprofit status from US tax authorities in July 2017. In 2017, the ICIJ,

the McClatchy Company The McClatchy Company, commonly referred to as simply McClatchy, is an American publishing company incorporated under Delaware's General Corporation Law and based in Sacramento, California. It operates 29 daily newspapers in fourteen states an ...

, and the ''

Miami Herald The ''Miami Herald'' is an American daily newspaper owned by the McClatchy Company and headquartered in Doral, Florida, a city in western Miami-Dade County and the Miami metropolitan area, several miles west of Downtown Miami.Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting The Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting has been presented since 1998, for a distinguished example of explanatory reporting that illuminates a significant and complex subject, demonstrating mastery of the subject, lucid writing and clear pr ...

for the Panama Papers. In total, the ICIJ won more than 20 awards for the Panama Papers.

Selected reports

Global tobacco industry

From 2008 to 2011, the ICIJ investigated the global tobacco industry, revealing how Philip Morris International and other tobacco companies worked to grow businesses in Russia, Mexico, Uruguay and Indonesia.

Offshore banking series

The ICIJ partnered with ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers '' The Observer'' and '' The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the ...

'', BBC, ''

Le Monde ''Le Monde'' (; ) is a French daily afternoon newspaper. It is the main publication of Le Monde Group and reported an average circulation of 323,039 copies per issue in 2009, about 40,000 of which were sold abroad. It has had its own website si ...

'', the ''

Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large na ...

'', '' SonntagsZeitung'', ''

The Indian Express ''The Indian Express'' is an English-language Indian daily newspaper founded in 1932. It is published in Mumbai by the Indian Express Group. In 1999, eight years after the group's founder Ramnath Goenka's death in 1991, the group was split be ...

'', ''

Süddeutsche Zeitung The ''Süddeutsche Zeitung'' (; ), published in Munich, Bavaria, is one of the largest daily newspapers in Germany. The tone of SZ is mainly described as centre-left, liberal, social-liberal, progressive-liberal, and social-democrat. Hist ...

'' and '' NDR'' to produce an investigative series on

offshore banking An offshore bank is a bank regulated under international banking license (often called offshore license), which usually prohibits the bank from establishing any business activities in the jurisdiction of establishment. Due to less regulation and ...

. They reported on government corruption across the globe, tax avoidance schemes used by wealthy people and the use of secret offshore accounts in

Ponzi Scheme A Ponzi scheme (, ) is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors. Named after Italian businessman Charles Ponzi, the scheme leads victims to believe that profits are comin ...

s. In June 2011, an ICIJ article revealed how an Australian businessman had helped his clients legally incorporate thousands of offshore shell entitles "some of which later became involved in the international movement of oil, guns and money." In April 2013, a report ( Offshore Leaks) disclosing details of 130,000 offshore accounts, some of which conducted international tax fraud. In early 2014, the ICIJ revealed that relatives of China's political and financial elite were among those using offshore tax havens to conceal wealth. In July 2019, the

Mauritius Leaks The Mauritius Leaks were the report of a datajournalistic investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in 2019 about how the former British colony Mauritius has transformed itself into a thriving financial centr ...

showed how

Mauritius Mauritius ( ; french: Maurice, link=no ; mfe, label= Mauritian Creole, Moris ), officially the Republic of Mauritius, is an island nation in the Indian Ocean about off the southeast coast of the African continent, east of Madagascar. It ...

was being used as one such tax haven. In January 2020, Luanda Leaks revealed how Angola's richest woman, Isabel dos Santos, used a network of Western advisors to amass a fortune. The investigation showed how dos Santos and her husband, Sindika Dokolo, built their empire taking advantage of many secrecy jurisdictions.

Panama Papers

The ''Süddeutsche Zeitung'' received a leaked set of 11.5 million confidential documents from a secret source, created by the Panamanian corporate service provider

Mossack Fonseca Mossack Fonseca & Co. () was a Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider. The so-called

provided detailed information on more than 214,000 offshore companies, including the identities of shareholders and directors which included government officials, close relatives and close associates of various heads of government of more than 40 countries. Because of the leak the prime minister of Iceland, Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, was forced to resign on 5 April 2016. By 4 April 2016 more than 100 media organisations had participated in analyzing the documents, including ''BBC Panorama'', and the UK newspaper, ''

''. Based on the Panama Paper disclosure, Pakistan Supreme Court constituted the Joint Investigation Team to probe the matter and disqualified the Prime Minister Nawas Sharif on 28 July 2017 to hold any public office for life. The ICIJ and ' received the Panama Papers in 2015 and distributed them to about 400 journalists at 107 media organizations in more than 80 countries. According to ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'',

Paradise Papers

In 2017, the German newspaper ''

'' obtained millions of leaked files known as the Paradise Papers, regarding

tax havens A tax is a compulsory financial charge or some other type of levy imposed on a taxpayer (an individual or legal entity) by a governmental organization in order to fund government spending and various public expenditures (regional, local, o ...

, related to the Bermuda-based offshore specialist Appleby. The files were shared the ICIJ and later the media. They revealed that many of the tax havens used by Appleby are in the Cayman Islands.

Pandora Papers

On October 3, 2021, the ICIJ began publishing 11.9 million leaked documents (comprising 2.9

terabytes The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...

of data) that came to be known as the Pandora Papers. The ICIJ described the document leak as their most expansive exposé of financial secrecy yet, containing documents, images, emails and spreadsheets from 14 financial service companies, in nations including

and the UAE, surpassing their previous release of the

in 2016, which had 11.5 million confidential documents. In total, the ICIJ won nine awards for the Pandora Papers including the Overseas Press Club of America's Malcolm Forbes Award for international business reporting and the

WAN-IFRA The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) is a non-profit, non-governmental organization made up of 76 national newspaper associations, 12 news agencies, 10 regional press organisations, and many individual newspaper ex ...

North American Digital Media Award.

Implant Files

In November 2018, the ICIJ published the Implant Files, the first global investigation into the medical device industry that tracked the harm caused by medical devices that have been tested inadequately or not at all. It took a year to plan and another year to complete. ICIJ partnered with 252 journalists from 59 media organisations in 36 countries to examine how devices are tested, approved, marketed and monitored. Anchoring the probe was an analysis of more than 8 million device-related health records, including death and injury reports and recalls. In total, the ICIJ won 11 awards for the Implant Files.

Mauritius Leaks

In July 2019, the ICIJ published the Mauritius Leaks, a datajournalistic investigation about how the former British colony Mauritius has transformed itself into a financial centre and tax haven. A whistleblower leaked documents from a law firm in Mauritius to the ICIJ, providing insight in how multinational companies avoid paying taxes when they do business in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

China Cables

In November 2019, the ICIJ revealed classified Chinese government documents leaked by exiled Uighurs, dubbed the China Cables which prove mass surveillance and

internment camps Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simpl ...

Uighurs The Uyghurs; ; ; ; zh, s=, t=, p=Wéiwú'ěr, IPA: ( ), alternatively spelled Uighurs, Uygurs or Uigurs, are a Turkic ethnic group originating from and culturally affiliated with the general region of Central and East Asia. The Uyghu ...

and other Muslim minorities in China's

Xinjiang Xinjiang, SASM/GNC: ''Xinjang''; zh, c=, p=Xīnjiāng; formerly romanized as Sinkiang (, ), officially the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR), is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China (PRC), located in the northwes ...

province.

FinCEN Files

In September 2020, the ICIJ along with ''

BuzzFeed News ''BuzzFeed News'' is an American news website published by BuzzFeed. It has published a number of high-profile scoops, including the Steele dossier, for which it was heavily criticized, and the FinCEN Files. Since its establishment in 2011, i ...

'' published leaked documents from the

Financial Crimes Enforcement Network The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) is a bureau of the United States Department of the Treasury that collects and analyzes information about financial transactions in order to combat domestic and international money laundering, terr ...

(FinCEN) that describe suspicious financial transactions across multiple global financial institutions.

Ericsson List

In February 2022, the ICIJ published the Ericsson List, an internal investigation into corruption inside the Swedish multinational networking and telecommunications company

Ericsson (lit. "Telephone Stock Company of LM Ericsson"), commonly known as Ericsson, is a Swedish multinational networking and telecommunications company headquartered in Stockholm. The company sells infrastructure, software, and services in inform ...

. It detailed corruption in at least 10 countries. Ericsson has admitted "serious breaches of compliance rules".

Uber Files

In July 2022, the ICIJ published the Uber Files, a leaked database of

Uber Uber Technologies, Inc. (Uber), based in San Francisco, provides mobility as a service, ride-hailing (allowing users to book a car and driver to transport them in a way similar to a taxi), food delivery ( Uber Eats and Postmates), pa ...

's activities in about 40 countries from 2013 to 2017. The documents were leaked to ''The Guardian'', and shared with the ICIJ and a number of media organisations.

Data journalism

In the course of the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers investigations, ICIJ was challenged to learn about and implement various technologies to manage international collaboration on terabytes of data – structured and unstructured (e.g. emails, PDFs) – and how to extract meaningful information from this data. Among the technologies used were the

Neo4j Neo4j is a graph database management system developed by Neo4j, Inc. Described by its developers as an ACID-compliant transactional database with native graph storage and processing, Neo4j is available in a non-open-source "community edition" ...

graph database management system and Linkurious to search and visualize the data. The data-intensive projects involved not just veteran investigative journalists, but also demanded data journalists and programmers. ICIJ's research platform is called Datashare. It is free and open source. Datashare was developed by ICIJ together with Swiss university

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne École may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France * École, Savoi ...

. In 2021, Datashare was improved to make 11.9 million records (2.9 terabytes) available to more than 600 journalists. Also in 2021, the ICIJ's technology team built a new open-source platform, Prophecies, to make data fact-checking more efficient. ICIJ's public Offshore Leaks Database a repository of information on companies registered in tax havens. It uses machine-learning techniques to analyze data. The ICIJ also provides advice on the use of other public databases, as well as research assistance to partner journalists.

Collaborative journalism

The ICIJ's collaborative journalism model has been described as a new departure for global journalism that embraces collaboration. ICIJ's cross-border collaboration, involves more than 140 newspapers, television and radio stations, and online media organizations, and is marked by transparency and peer scrutiny. The stories that result from the collaboration are published simultaneously around the world and made available to readers free. The ICIJ is funded entirely by donations.

Awards and recognition

ICIJ's collaborations have received several awards, including the 2017

Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting The Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting has been presented since 1998, for a distinguished example of explanatory reporting that illuminates a significant and complex subject, demonstrating mastery of the subject, lucid writing and clear pr ...

. Their work to uncover financial secrecy was nominated for the 2021

Nobel Peace Prize The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Swedish industrialist, inventor and armaments (military weapons and equipment) manufacturer Alfred Nobel, along with the prizes in Chemistry, Physics, Physiolo ...

. In 2021, the ICIJ also won a News Emmy along with PBS Frontline for its Luanda Leaks investigation and was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for the FinCEN Files. In 2022, the ICIJ was awarded the Katharine Graham Award for courage and accountability by the

White House Correspondents’ Association The White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA) is an organization of journalists who cover the White House and the president of the United States. The WHCA was founded on February 25, 1914, by journalists in response to an unfounded rumor t ...

. ICIJ also received an Honourable Mention award at the 2022 Allard Prize for International Integrity. The ICIJ organized the bi-annual ''

Daniel Pearl Daniel Pearl (October 10, 1963 – February 1, 2002) was an American journalist who worked for ''The Wall Street Journal.'' He was kidnapped and later decapitated by terrorists in Pakistan.' Pearl was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and rais ...

Awards for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting''. The award is currently not being awarded.

GuideStar Candid is an information service specializing in reporting on U.S. nonprofit companies. In 2016, its database provided information on 2.5 million organizations.Wyland, Michael. "GuideStar Introduces Program Metrics Section for Nonprofit Profile ...

, a nonprofits evaluator, gave the ICIJ a "Gold Seal of Transparency" in 2019.

References

External links

* {{Authority control News agencies based in the United States Online person databases Organizations established in 1997 Organizations based in Washington, D.C. News leaks 1997 establishments in Washington, D.C. Offshoring Paradise Papers Panama Papers Pandora Papers Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism winners International Consortium of Investigative Journalists Investigative journalism