Journalism Development Network dba OCCRP

OCCRP has grown exponentially in both size and stature since I co-founded it in 2006, and our geographic presence has expanded from Europe and Eurasia to include Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, with inroads into Asia. This expansion was critical to our mission, as the destructive forces of organized crime and elite corruption divert wealth and disrupt democracy with impunity around the world. 

OCCRP’s investigative reporting on organized crime and corruption changed the focus from national stories to begin treating corruption across borders as the norm. We are stopping criminals from doing business as usual. 

To continue growing our impact, we need to scale up our data, security, and reporting infrastructures to reach a level where we provide better context, strategies, and tools that allow other actors and the public to take informed action.

The flexible funding, connections, mentorship, and amplification resources awarded by the Elevate Prize will help OCCRP continue to tell the stories that the public can engage with, take our reporting and tech innovation to the next level, and build the infrastructure required to sustain and scale our model for impact.

As a child growing up in Romania I was struck by the pervasiveness of corruption and international organized crime that captured and thrived in Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism. My family was a victim and so were many around me. It’s why I became a journalist, to try fight organized crime and corruption.

 With time, I deepened my knowledge of criminal organizations and their operations. I talked with criminals and their victims and I realized they were efficient because they networked across borders for decades. We needed to catch up. It takes a network to fight a network and it takes combined human and tech infrastructure to build it.

 I carried this vision with me when co-founding OCCRP. I grew the organization with the hard work of OCCRP’s reporters who built on an evolving tech foundation that allowed us to reverse-engineer the global criminal infrastructure.

 We used this knowledge against criminals, and it’s working. We need to scale up, we must put more science in our reporting to better serve the public. Ultimately, we must take investigative journalism to a new level of efficiency, empowering the public to push for transparency and demand accountability from those in power.

The last five decades have seen the dramatic globalization of organized crime and corruption, now totaling trillions of dollars every year. OCCRP envisions a world where lives, livelihoods, and democracy are not threatened by crime and corruption. To achieve this vision, we aim to expose crime and corruption so the public can hold power to account.

Our mission is rooted in our theory of change. We expose crime and corruption, serving as a catalyst that arms others with information needed to drive change. Using these revelations, advocates press for policy reform and package information for law enforcement with the authority to act on evidence and deliver justice. Policymakers point to investigative findings to pass legislation and advance reforms. Citizens who read our work get the information to act and organize on their own behalf.

We know our work is needed by the extent to which our member centers and journalists rely on our services and how often they partner on high-impact stories. Regular use of our findings by advocates, law enforcement, policymakers, and citizens to advance change further underscore the need, evidenced by our significant impact and as a result of reforms implemented following our stories.

OCCRP is reinventing investigative journalism making it cheaper, stronger, and faster to accelerate the rate of exposure. Using a vast repository of data, efficient collaborative systems that leverage expertise and local knowledge across media outlets, and an in-house developed search engine to cross-reference records and track criminal patterns, OCCRP is lowering the cost of investigative reporting for all participating centers, while speeding it up and taking investigations to scale.

OCCRP sees its role in the wider anti-corruption ecosystem as a catalyst for activating and accelerating the impact of a range of other key actors: journalists, advocates,  governments, especially law enforcement, and citizens and enabling a wider complementary and cumulative effect. Our network of investigative journalists can effectively mine the haystacks for illicit connections and activities and expose crime and corruption at the highest levels, while advocates can press for policy change and package information for law enforcement in ways that journalists cannot. Law enforcement has official authority to act on information but officially stops at the border limiting its ability to move quickly to follow the money. Policymakers can pass legislation and advance reforms. Citizens have the ultimate say, deciding whether leaders retain office and power.  

OCCRP envisions a world where lives, livelihoods, and democracy are not threatened by crime and corruption. To achieve this vision, we develop and equip a global network of investigative journalists and publish their stories, exposing crime and corruption so the public can hold power to account.

Our activities fall into four categories: 1) support for OCCRP member centers; 2) development of tech tools for data-driven investigations; 3) publication of cross-border investigations; and 4) partnering with civil society to accelerate impact.

We ensure adherence to the highest editorial standards and provide the network with critical resources, including editorial, research, digital and physical security, data, legal, and sustainability support. Our development of tech tools has made cross-border investigative journalism better, faster, and cheaper. At the center of those tools is OCCRP Aleph, a data platform allowing journalists to cross-reference records to identify illicit connections. Our stories expose corruption to the public, but unlike most traditional media, OCCRP also partners with advocacy groups, arming civil society with information essential to press for change in ways journalists cannot. Since 2017, we have led a Global Anti-corruption Consortium to bring our journalists together with Transparency International’s global movement of advocates to maximize impact.