In April 2023, OCCRP staff train reporters in Malta on topics such as data analysis and the best ways to present an investigation. (Photo courtesy of Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project)
The idea for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), one of the world’s leading investigative journalism outlets, took shape when Romanian reporter Paul Radu and American reporter Drew Sullivan met and traded notes on human-trafficking networks at a journalism conference in Bulgaria in 2003. Both men were heading investigative journalism centers—Radu at the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism in Romania and Sullivan at the Center for Investigative Reporting in Bosnia and Herzegovina—and began to share information and access to expensive research database tools like LexisNexis. Not long after, they coled an award-winning investigation into exploitative energy brokers who had sparked a regional energy cost crisis in southeastern Europe that was published in 2007. Two years later, in 2009, they established their first headquarters in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, with journalists from both centers.
“We realized the same people were appearing in different countries, [and] we were dealing with the same kind of criminal structures,” Sullivan says. “If we were going to report on organized crime and follow these networks, we needed to be a network ourselves.”
Since its founding in 2007, OCCRP has played a major role in the largest collaborative global data investigations in modern journalism history, such as the Panama Papers, a leak by an anonymous source of 11.5 million documents from one of the world’s biggest offshore law firms, Mossack Fonseca, that showed how the rich hide their money through offshore companies and bank accounts. OCCRP has also led others that have paved the way for high-level political dismissals, arrests, and prosecutions. The organization claims that its investigations have led to the recovery of $10 billion in illicit funds, 417 official investigations, hundreds of arrest warrants being issued, and more than 100 high-level firings or resignations.
The organization has gained attention and acclaim through pursuing cross-border investigations into organized crime in Eastern Europe that often involves shell companies, offshore finances, and government officials. OCCRP’s award-winning investigations have taken aim at everyone from oligarchs in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle escaping sanctions after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine to the misogynist social media influencer Andrew Tate, who claimed to have partnered with “mafia guys” to run casinos before he was arrested on human trafficking and rape charges in Romania. With long document trails, a touch of gallows humor, and pithily titled investigations such as the “The Azerbaijani Laundromat” and “Dominica: Passports of the Caribbean,” OCCRP is fighting to keep audiences engaged in a global political climate where apathy reigns and trust in news has plummeted.
Over the past 15+ years, OCCRP has established a network of reporters across six continents, strong relationships with anticorruption organizations and regional and global media outlets, and a stable of Western private and government donors. Its headquarters are now based in Amsterdam, with offices in Sarajevo and Washington, DC. The tech-savvy organization continues to grow despite widespread disinformation, concerns about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on news dissemination, and ongoing attacks on the truth and the journalists who seek it.
Collaboration, technology, news moxie and foresight, and a concerted effort to diversify its funding streams have all contributed to OCCRP’s success. With plans to develop cloud networks and AI tools to accelerate and broaden collaborative data investigations, as well as projects with filmmakers underway to adapt investigative stories for the silver screen, OCCRP has set its ambitions high.
Fighting Corruption With Collaboration
Corruption costs the world at least $2.6 trillion, or nearly 5 percent of global GDP annually, according to figures from the World Economic Forum. The World Bank estimates that individuals pay more than $1 trillion in bribes every year, and studies have shown that corruption exacerbates poverty and inequality. Corruption also undermines democracy by entrenching the power of autocratic and oligarchic governments and eroding accountability structures, such as the judiciary, as so many Eastern European countries have demonstrated.
“These corrupt governments form large patronage networks fueled by the theft of state resources,” Sullivan says. “Increasingly these governments violate human rights, corrupt elections, plunder natural resources, and ultimately create conflict from their inherent instability.”
As technology, the internet, and the global financial system become more interconnected, criminal networks continue to outpace the capacity of law enforcement to track and prosecute them. Believing that open access and data sharing are crucial to effective local and global investigations that can hold the corrupt accountable, OCCRP developed Aleph, a massive database that hosts 310 datasets from sources around the world that helps journalists track companies and persons of interest. OCCRP’s data team prototyped the database in 2014-15, with later funding provided by the Google News Initiative, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Aleph is now used by more than 23,000 journalists, researchers, and activists globally, all of whom must apply for access to this free resource.
Radu aspires to democratize investigative journalism so that citizens can conduct investigations—what he envisions as a kind of “global intelligence agency.” In 2016, OCCRP joined forces with the Germany-based foundation Transparency International to set up the Global Anti-Corruption Consortium, which encourages cooperation between journalists and civil society. And last year, OCCRP cofounded the Journalism Cloud Alliance, which seeks to build affordable cloud infrastructure for journalists to pursue cross-border investigative projects that often involve large datasets and volumes of documents. But Sullivan and Radu claim that, unlike conventional intelligence agencies, OCCRP maintains a clear line between its work, on the one hand, and law enforcement and activist groups, on the other.
“Our job is to tell the story and then for smarter people than us to figure out what should be done about it—if we decide what is done, then we’re no longer an independent arbiter of information,” Sullivan says.
Part of OCCRP’s strategy has been to collaborate with journalists and media organizations and to adapt stories for both local and Western audiences to expand reach. Its network consists of more than 65 editors across six continents and more than 65 regional member centers. Europe has the majority of editors, while Africa hosts the second-largest group among continents.
“At any given time, literally more than a hundred stories are in the works all over the world,” says Sullivan, who estimates that the organization publishes a hundred stories each year, with investigations ranging from three to nine months to complete.
The challenge is reaching audiences and making them care. Corruption fatigue among the public remains an issue.
OCCRP revenues doubled between 2022 and 2023 to $31 million, due to the establishment of a new USAID-funded journalist legal defense project called Reporters Shield, for which it manages subgrants.
Such US government funding, however, has drawn criticism. A December 2024 investigation, conducted by a small group of media outlets in the United States and Europe, suggested the organization obscured the fact that half of its funding came from the US government, and that the US government had authority over the organization’s leadership roles and content. The report also intimated that the OCCRP was being used by the United States as a soft-power tool, claiming the organization was “granted funds to pursue several other topic areas and countries considered a priority by Washington,” including Russia, according to the US-based Drop Site News, one of the outlets that were part of the investigation.
OCCRP denied these claims in a statement issued on its website but admits it is concerned about its reliance on US funding but stresses its ongoing efforts to diversify its funding streams. “Relying on government funding for investigative reporting is not ideal, but we work in parts of the world where no other funding exists. Few institutional donors work in Central Asia or the Pacific,” explains Lauren Jackman, OCCRP’s head of communications. “OCCRP takes funding to work in places where investigative reporting wouldn’t exist.”
Looming Threats
Lawsuits against OCCRP and protecting its journalists remain the biggest challenges for the organization. There are currently 90 lawsuits against journalists who are part of its network, with 6 aimed at the organization for investigations they have produced—lawsuits that OCCRP claims have been launched to silence journalists and undermine investigative reporting more generally. OCCRP and other journalism rights organizations have called attention to how legal cases, particularly libel cases, are pursued by the powerful and corrupt as a form of intimidation. Reporters Shield was in part established to help OCCRP fight these cases in court.
Journalists associated with OCCRP also have had their lives threatened, and OCCRP has extended its security protocols to anyone it works with. While OCCRP regularly checks in with its journalists during research and prior to publication, OCCRP’s Central Europe editor Pavla Holcová says that the personal costs of investigative journalism can be significant, with some journalists deciding not to have families because of potential threats to loved ones. In 2018, one of her colleagues was murdered while he was investigating a story on the Slovakian mafia. Burnout has become a significant concern, and the organization has hired a contractor to provide mental health counseling to journalists and implemented a “liberal time off policy,” Jackman says.
Another significant challenge is the rising lack of trust in journalists and the news, in addition to the rise of misinformation and disinformation. OCCRP’s particular struggle is that most of its content is dense and aimed for readers invested in policy and investigative reporting. It has been strategizing on how to make its complex investigations more accessible to a general audience.
How organizations like OCCRP will adapt to a media landscape where more and more people get their news on social media remains a significant question. “The challenge is reaching audiences and making them care,” says Susan Valentine, director of media and expression at the Open Society Foundations (OSF), one of OCCRP’s funders. She notes that corruption fatigue among the public remains an issue. OCCRP is working with a social media and engagement editor to keep its audience interested and to help expand its reach.
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Update: OCCRP this year has lost most of its funding from the US government, which accounted for 38 percent of its budget.
“Independent investigative journalism around the world is in an existential crisis,” says Lauren Jackman, OCCRP head of communications. “The threats include the withdrawal of US government funding (the biggest funder of independent media in the world) in an already resource-challenged field, emboldened autocrats passing foreign agent and other laws to silence journalists and jail them, and other attacks from powerful enemies of the free press.”
Read more stories by Clair MacDougall.