Following the money

We are living in the golden age of fraud.<br />But we’re also in a golden age for data leaks.<br />In the last six years we’ve seen a cascade of information from places like Panama, Switzerland and Dubai—these are countries where lawyers, accountants and bankers promise secrecy while serving the rich and powerful. <br />The tens of millions of leaked documents have helped shine light on the financial affairs of the wealthy and well-connected. But they’ve also opened the ill-gotten gains of many corrupt politicians and bureaucrats to public view. <br />For every money movement through a tax haven, there’s a digital record that can be traced by a growing army of citizen journalists and activists. <br />In the latest New Money Review podcast I’m joined by someone who’s helped organise that activist army and tell some of their data-driven stories.<br />Paul Radu is an investigative journalist and co-founder of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).<br />Paul is a winner of the Daniel Pearl Award, the Global Shining Light Award, the European Press Prize, and the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. He was also part of the Panama Papers team that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Journalism.<br />When oligarchs, corrupt politicians or criminals seek to move their money out of the public eye, the OCCRP is there to shed light on what they are doing.<br />This is a global and a growing problem. The amounts being looted are increasing exponentially, reaching trillions a year. The money launderers are becoming ever more sophisticated in hiding what they are doing. There’s a global network of bankers, accountants, lawyers and PR agents supporting them. And in many countries, the oligarchs and criminals are effectively above the law.<br />This is a topic we should all know something about. Listen in for a fascinating discussion of large-scale financial crime, including:<br />Why transnational organised crime groups are now more powerful than statesHow investigative reporting can combat their influenceWhy criminal money flows often follow a patternHow the OCCRP discovered the ‘laundromats’ that service multiple criminal groupsWhy banks didn’t notice the problem at the outsetWhy criminals are some of the cleverest entrepreneursHow money launderers exploit geopolitical riftsWhy some countries with low corruption scores are enablers of financial crimeHow open-access real estate and property registries can combat money launderingCriminals’ Achilles heel—where to place their stolen moneyThe Russia/Ukraine war and political grand corruptionCoping with the enormous scale of leaked dataStaying current with ‘follow-the-money’ techniquesHow a new generation of citizen investigative journalists can help