2023
In 2023, veteran investigative journalist Miranda Patrucic moved into the editor-in-chief slot and oversaw more than 100 investigations and stories. It has been an incredible year for both OCCRP and Miranda, who started as one of the organization’s first employees in 2007 — as a fact checker.
The investigations came from all corners of the globe and provided rare insight into illicit practices at a Central American development bank and the Russian oligarch playbook for avoiding sanctions. With more than 40 reporting partners, we published NarcoFiles: The New Criminal Order, the largest investigation on organized crime to originate in Latin America.
Also this year, OCCRP launched new initiatives that serve the investigative journalism industry as a whole. Reporters Shield is a first-of-its-kind membership program that protects investigative reporting and Floodlight connects investigative reporting with the film and television industry to produce informed fiction in the public interest.
As democracy, rule of law, and press freedom continue to be challenged around the globe, investigative reporting remains a powerful tool to help bring about the world we want to see. Because of this, we are more focused than ever on supporting investigative media everywhere, partnering with different types of organizations to achieve impact, and innovating solutions to problems journalists face. Thank you for reading and supporting OCCRP — and for joining the fight against organized crime and corruption.
With gratitude,
Drew Sullivan and Paul Radu
Co-Founders, OCCRP
OCCRP believes it takes a network to fight a network.
We lead collaborative projects with investigative journalists to publish hard-hitting stories.
We provide training, tools, and resources so investigative outlets can thrive.
We develop new technology and solutions that serve the entire industry.
We accelerate the fight against global crime and corruption with groundbreaking partnerships.
“Our goal is to change the world, to create a global space where reporters can work effortlessly across borders and team up to do hard-hitting stories that result in a better world.”
Drew Sullivan, Co-Founder and Publisher
Training with journalists in Malta.
In partnership with the Daphne Foundation, OCCRP staff led data, design, and photography workshops, and panel discussions with experts from the region.
team members around the world
member centers & regional partners
annual budget
publishing partners
stories and investigations a year
requests fielded by OCCRP ID
entities in OCCRP Aleph
"Collaborative investigative reporting is crucial and is one of the only tools at our disposal to piece together the global drug puzzle."
Paul Radu, Co-Founder
Mexican police work to dismantle drug cartels.
OCCRP’s NarcoFiles project showed how a group of gangs and criminals worked together to feed one of the world’s busiest drug highways: Latin America to Europe.
Fines Levied and Monies Seized
Government Actions
Indictments and Arrests
Official Investigations
Civic Society Reactions
High Level Resignations and Sackings
Corporate Actions
Swiss prosecutors charged Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of Uzbekistan's former president, with running an international crime syndicate that laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes. The authorities seized assets worth $857 million. OCCRP revealed Karimova’s corrupt business practices and money laundering activities in several investigations.
Our 2020 stories about the massive offshore wealth of Lebanon’s central bank governor Riad Salame continue to see results, including official investigations across Europe and asset seizure. In 2023, the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. all imposed sanctions on Salame and three of his associates for embezzling $300 million from the central bank during his tenure.
Taiwan’s Finance Ministry demanded reforms at the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI), which was exposed in "The Dictators’ Bank" for funding projects that facilitated corruption and authoritarianism.
65 members of Congress cited OCCRP’s story, “Hundreds of Members of Extremist Group Oath Keepers Worked for U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Leaked Roster Shows,” in a letter to the Department of Homeland Security, calling for an update on the steps and actions taken to weed out extremists within DHS ranks.
Austria’s Green Party called for a special investigative authority after "The Rotenberg Files" showed that a chalet was financed by a Cypriot company clearly traceable to the sanctioned oligarch Arkady Rotenberg.
"It is incomprehensible to me why investigative journalists have to take on the research work that is actually the responsibility of state authorities - in this case the Ministry of the Interior."
Nina Tomaselli
Austrian Green Party MP
Readers come to OCCRP for news and information they can’t get anywhere else and to gain a larger understanding of how modern day organized crime and corruption operate.
Together with our partners, OCCRP published more than 115 stories and investigations in 2023, including breaking news reports, several big collaborative projects, and one-of-a-kind analyses.
A rare look into a development bank — in one of the most unequal regions on earth — showed how the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI) has funded projects that led to environmental destruction and the murder of activists, and others where loans were diverted for corrupt practices or used to fund the pet projects of dictators.
“OCCRP and its media partners began publishing the investigation in late October, exposing a slate of problems in the bank. Above all, the journalists found, CABEI has become an easy source of cash for regional authoritarians…”
Foreign Policy
This investigation revealed how two people connected to the Adani Group spent years buying and selling Adani stock through offshore structures that obscured their involvement — and made considerable profits in the process.
“Adani shares slide after report alleges ‘opaque’ offshore investment funds.”
CNBC
For years, one man colluded with corrupt customs officials to dominate the vast flow of Chinese imports — everything from t-shirts to high-end electronics — that sustain Central Asia. This is the story of how he turned himself and his brothers into big-time businessmen — as Central Asian governments welcomed their money with open arms.
Police in Papua New Guinea launched an international bribery probe into allegations of corruption against former executives of the country’s ports company after a joint investigation by OCCRP and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Police are investigating whether the executives were involved in a bribery scheme to award International Container Terminal Services, a Philippines-based ports operator, a contract for operating the country’s largest terminals.
Chinese-born Cary Yan and Gina Zhou were sentenced by a U.S. court in early 2023 over a plot to bribe Marshall Islands politicians and create an autonomous zone near an important U.S. military facility in the Pacific. But OCCRP reporters found that the controversial plan was just one part of a global grifting odyssey by the pair. In a few short years, Yan and Zhou went from hawking a miracle water cure to running a sham United Nations organization on Manhattan’s Third Avenue and rubbing shoulders with diplomats and world leaders. The pair managed to gain access to the U.N. thanks to over $1 million in clandestine payments to diplomats.
OCCRP was a partner in the "Story Killers" project led by Forbidden Stories that investigated the global disinformation-for-hire industry. In a story about a Spanish reputation management company that helped bad actors around the world erase their past, undercover reporters recorded a group of covert cyber influence specialists as they pitched their services, which involved using disinformation campaigns, false intelligence, hacks and blackmail to promote their clients’ interests. The group claims to have worked on dozens of presidential elections around the world.
In 2022, beneficial ownership registries closed public access following the court ruling made after Luxembourg businessman Patrick Hansen filed a lawsuit. In 2023, OCCRP found that Hansen was directing offshore companies for wealthy Russians, including the Kolikov family, which loaned nearly $100M to Hansen's aviation company.
“Denying the public the right to know who is buying the most expensive real estate in their countries and taking politicians on yacht cruises isn’t wise or moral.”
OCCRP’s Deputy Editor in Chief Julia Wallace and Senior Editor Ilya Lozovsky in POLITICO
This global collaboration, led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and Paper Trail Media, offers unprecedented insight into how Cypriot firms and law firms helped Russian oligarchs and billionaires organize — and hide — their wealth over the years. Stories by OCCRP and its partners showed how powerful Russians used Cyprus and its service industry to do everything from moving millions across the world to purchasing the rights to young soccer players.
Reporters obtained the names of 7,700 people who bought into Dominica’s “citizenship by investment” program, which allows the purchase of a passport for a base price of $100,000. Passports from the country allow visa-free or “visa on arrival” travel to more than 130 countries and territories, including in the European Union. The list includes a Libyan colonel who served under Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein’s top nuclear scientist, oligarchs, and politicians — like the former Prime Minister of Jordan.
This global investigation revealed how the billionaire brothers Boris and Arkady Rotenberg scrambled to hide their assets after being sanctioned by the West in the wake of Russia’s initial 2014 invasion of Ukraine.
“Oligarchs are sanctioned by the West in an attempt to punish them, and yet undermining sanctions would be impossible without Western enablers — lawyers, bankers, consultants, and other professionals.”
OCCRP’s Editor in Chief Miranda Patrucic in the New York Post
Western sanctions are meant to prevent Russia from supplying its military from abroad, but sensitive electronics are still getting through. Reporters traced several of these supply chains through Kazakhstan — and found that they run through companies newly established by Russians.
Multiple scams involving fake biofuels have erupted in northern Europe in recent years. This investigation showed several cases were linked by a Bosnian company that sold thousands of tons of fraudulent fuel across the European Union.
TIAA has always insisted that its joint ventures with Brazilian sugar company Cosan invest responsibly. But leaked documents showed they ignored a litany of red flags when buying farms in a region long known for land grabbing — Brazil's Cerrado, the planet's most biologically rich savanna which nurtures about five percent of the world's plant and animal species.
On June 5, 2022, British journalist Dom Phillips and his Brazilian guide Bruno Pereira disappeared in Brazil’s Javari Valley, in the Amazon. Reporters from OCCRP, Forbidden Stories, TV Globo, Amazônia Real, Ojo Público, and The Guardian published an investigation a year later into the illegal fishing gangs thought to be behind their deaths.
OCCRP’s first Hackathon pulled in 35 data journalists and technologists from our network, including Bellingcat, Reuters, and Follow the Money. Teams made substantial progress on tackling real challenges journalists face, like working on a mobile ship-tracking device to record routes and signals of ships, and a Telegram scraper to investigate Russian propaganda.
Our research arm responded to 1,700+ requests and a number of new datasets were added to our investigative data platform, OCCRP Aleph: The Greek shipping registry contains information about vessels registered in Greece, the companies that own them, and their directors and managers. Documents from the Kenya treasury website offer insights into key actors and influential companies in the East African region and beyond.
The Aleph team delivered a number of new features and updates to existing functionality to ensure that it remains valuable to journalists and the 24,000+ registered users. Work included: overhauling the way in which we process PDF documents, future proofing this feature as well as improving its speed and stability; and making changes to the cross-referencing feature to ensure it continued to return high-quality results.
OCCRP helped create the first-ever charter on artificial intelligence (AI) and journalism, which aims to define ethics and standards for journalists, newsrooms, and media outlets throughout the world to use when working with AI.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) led the initiative in collaboration with 16 partners, including OCCRP.
The Paris Charter on AI and Journalism establishes 10 essential principles for protecting information integrity and upholding journalism’s social purpose. Its core principles stipulate that “ethics must govern technological choices within the media; human agency must remain central in editorial decisions; the media must help society to distinguish between authentic and synthetic content with confidence... and must participate in global AI governance and defend the viability of journalism when negotiating with tech companies.”
“To safeguard the right to information, journalists and news organizations must join forces to ensure ethics guide the governance and use of the most transformative technology of our time.”
Maria Ressa
Founder and CEO, Rappler
OCCRP's Chief Product Officer Mark Nightingale speaks at a hackathon in Moldova.
By working to understand the needs of readers, the Product Department brings together designers and engineers to develop tools, services, and platforms that meet those needs, ensuring effective and engaging digital experiences across the organization.
In 2023, OCCRP doubled the staff on this team and focused on investigative tooling, design, and audience engagement.
OCCRP made a notable transition from our legacy wiki system to the Confluence Cloud platform, providing our network of nearly 2,000 journalists with a more integrated and user-friendly workspace. Confluence Cloud facilitates better collaboration and access to critical information, key to the effective management of investigative projects. The platform’s functionalities, such as real-time editing, advanced content management, and customizable templates, are instrumental in addressing the complexities of investigative journalism.
The Global Anti-Corruption Consortium (GACC) accelerates the fight against corruption by connecting hard-hitting investigative journalism to skillful civil society advocacy. GACC is led by OCCRP and Transparency International (TI).
Find out more about GACC
Journalists publish investigations
Journalists + advocates share information
Civil society advocacy + legal submissions
Real world results
In 2023, GACC advanced its four aims
“It's really important to disrupt the systems and the networks that enable corruption. We're concerned about the role of professional enablers… the bankers, wealth managers, lawyers, real estate agents, PR firms, and others that facilitate corruption.”
Alexandra Gillies
OCCRP's Global Anti-Corruption Consortium Director
In July, GACC organized a workshop in Brussels on “Revealing and Reining in the Professional Enablers of Corruption.” Over three days, civil society experts, government officials, investigative journalists, and private sector representatives gathered to discuss concrete ideas for how to investigate enabling activity and ensure greater deterrence and accountability. Watch sessions from the workshop here.
Since OCCRP reports on organized crime and high level corruption in dangerous countries and tough media environments, journalist and team member safety has been a top priority since day one and is a topic of daily discussion.
OCCRP’s Staff Safety & Security Team provides a range of services, including physical and digital security training and rapid response assistance for staff and members of the global OCCRP network.
In 2023, OCCRP's Staff Safety & Security Team:
To ensure the highest level of safety and security, we focus on six areas:
Reporters Shield Startup Director Peter Noorlander speaks about Reporters Shield at the U.N. on World Press Freedom Day.
Reporters Shield Launches on May 3, 2023, World Press Freedom Day
To confront the growing threat of vexatious lawsuits intended to harass and silence independent media worldwide, Reporters Shield launched on World Press Freedom Day as a new membership program defending investigative journalism against such lawsuits, known as “strategic lawsuits against public participation,” or SLAPPs.
Corrupt and criminal figures file SLAPPs to threaten, intimidate, and financially burden journalists. Fighting them entails paying expensive attorneys, suffering years of emotional stress, and spending enormous amounts of time on defense, distracting journalists from their work. As a result, media outlets are often forced to avoid reporting about litigious subjects, and may preemptively take down stories when receiving legal threats.
Reporters Shield was developed by investigative journalists at the OCCRP and lawyers from the Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice, with assistance and support from insurance specialists.
“Reporters Shield is a coordinated global solution that will counter SLAPP threats and work to support press freedom, democracy, and the free flow of information that the public needs to make decisions.”
Peter Noorlander
Reporters Shield Startup Director
María Consuelo Porras, Guatemala’s Attorney General
María Consuelo Porras, Guatemala’s Attorney General, has acted as an efficient instrument used by the government to eviscerate the rule of law. She has overseen efforts to prevent president elect Bernardo Arévalo from assuming office, including suspending his political party and raiding the election commission. Arévalo has called it a “coup in slow motion.” The moves by Porras and her government allies have thrown Central America’s most populous country into political crisis, with protestors taking to the streets and blocking a main highway leading into the capital, Guatemala City. Porras represents a type of actor that has not been recognized before by OCCRP’s Person of the Year award. She is not a colorful autocrat but a dry bureaucrat who carries out “her duty” — which is to derail democracy and protect the kleptocratic elite.
“Porras is protecting what has been called in Guatemala ‘the pact of the corrupt,’ … she has brutally persecuted honest prosecutors, journalists, and activists, chasing them into exile and depriving the public of these crucial checks on authority."
María Teresa Ronderos
Director of the Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística (CLIP) and a panel judge.
OCCRP, the Guardian, and 27 partners won the Innovation Award from the European Press Prize for the Russian Asset Tracker.
Drew Sullivan and Paul Radu received the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Watch their acceptance speech.
The Banality of Brutality, 33 days under siege in Block 17, Bucha, Ukraine, won an Online Journalism Award in the Excellence and Innovation in Visual Digital Storytelling category.
The Rotenberg Files won First Place in best collaborative investigative/enterprise reporting category.
Beneficial ownership data is critical in the fight against corruption was runner up in the best business reporting on a website category.
Are you ready to venture into the shadows? A limited series, Dirty Deeds: Tales of Global Crime & Corruption features reporting from some of OCCRP's most important investigations, showcasing our worldwide network of journalists who cross borders — and bad guys — to shine a bright light on some of the world’s most dangerous criminals. From the oil fields of Venezuela to the rosewood forests of Namibia to the steppes of Central Asia, each episode is the inside story of how the powerful, unscrupulous, and well-connected can acquire unimaginable wealth — and of what it takes to expose them.
Together with the Gabo Foundation and film industry professionals, OCCRP launched Floodlight: Fiction in the Public Interest, a new initiative that connects investigative journalists with filmmakers to produce fiction that informs, illuminates, and entertains. The inaugural Floodlight Summit brought investigative reporters and film and tv industry veterans together for days of pitches, keynote speeches, panel discussions, and one-on-one meetings. Attendees left Floodlight inspired and with a new appreciation of the opposite field. Relationships and collaborations were formed and several projects moved forward.
“The opportunity to hear the backstories and details of the most pressing investigations happening around the world right now, directly from the journalists putting their lives on the line in search of truth, was tremendous.”
Susannah Grant
Screenwriter and Producer, Erin Brockovich
“Floodlight was long overdue. Putting the world's best investigative journalists, who are eager to share their work, in the same room with filmmakers who want to bring great stories to the screen was a masterstroke.”
Walter Robinson
Investigative Journalist, The Boston Globe, and consultant on the film Spotlight
Executive Director
Institute for the Future
Former Executive Vice President
Stockholm School of Economics in Riga (SSE Riga)
Founder
The Centre for Media Studies at SSE Riga
Dean
Klein College of Media and Communication, Temple University
Network Correspondent
Univision Network
Director and Editor
Re:Baltica
Founder and CEO
Tiny Ventures
Ex-Officio Director
OCCRP
Ex-Officio Director
OCCRP
Patrick J. McGovern Foundation
Slovak Agency for International Development Cooperation
Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency
Jed Ringel Foundation
United Kingdom Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
U.S. Agency for International Development
Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs of France
Special thank you to the Dutch Postcode Lottery whose generous support, along with the Limelight Foundation and Vereniging Veronica, enabled our global headquarters' move to Amsterdam in 2022.
In 2023, core editors and staff continued to relocate to Amsterdam. OCCRP is building partnerships in the Netherlands with publishing, reporting, and press freedom partners, as well as participating in and organizing events in the country.
OCCRP continued to use Amsterdam as a hub for coordinating some of our most significant global investigations such as The Dictators’ Bank, NarcoFiles, and Dominica: Passports of the Caribbean. In November, our Research & Data Team held an intensive 10-day training program in Amsterdam for fellows from around the world and held OCCRP’s first Hackathon for the wider community to solve difficult challenges for the investigative journalism community.
OCCRP’s Accomplice program gives readers the opportunity to join our mission to strengthen investigative journalism and expose crime and corruption so the public can hold power to account.
Highlighting many of the reasons that make us unique, OCCRP’s fall campaign asked readers to “help us investigate what others can’t.”
We exceeded our fundraising goal of $100,000 thanks to the enthusiastic support of OCCRP Accomplices and a generous donor who matched donations.
Pulling from across the network we interviewed journalists from Latin America, Africa, Oceania, and Europe who spoke about OCCRP’s expertise, editorial support, collaboration, unparalleled data technology, research assistance, and journalist safety training — all of which empower them to do their jobs.
Join the more than 1,000 globally minded individuals who support us through this program. Become an OCCRP Accomplice by visiting our website.
"I admire the work you are doing and wish there was more of this journalism worldwide."
A new OCCRP Accomplice
2023 Total Assets
$21,987,057
2022 Total Assets
$12,192,154
2023 Total Liabilities
$1,042,113
2022 Total Liabilities
$1,044,856
See full financial statements
