2025-12-03 16:00:22
Seas and oceans cover more than two-thirds of the planet, yet remain among the least regulated and under-monitored spaces on the planet. Weak oversight, fragmented jurisdictions, and vast unpatrolled areas create conditions where environmental crimes, from illegal fishing to wildlife trafficking, continue largely out of sight.
At the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25), speakers from around the world spoke at a panel entitled “Innovative Methodologies for Uncovering Environmental Crimes in the Ocean” to outline practical methodologies that reporters can use to investigate crimes at sea, even when evidence is limited and documentation is incomplete.
Maria Dalby of GRID-Arendal explains how jurisdictional loopholes are exploited by criminal networks on the open ocean. Image: Alyaa Abdul Aziz Alhadjri for GIJN
Maria Dalby, head of media relations for GRID-Arendal, a Norwegian environmental organization, explained that maritime crime thrives where governance is weakest. With overlapping regimes and few enforcement mechanisms, criminal networks exploit the gaps.
She highlighted two major global treaties that will reshape future reporting:
Both treaties, she said, will create fresh opportunities for investigative journalists to track how governments and corporations adapt, or fail to comply, with emerging rules.
One of the most replicable methods shared came from Daniela Castro, formerly of OCCRP. She presented a cross-border shark-fin trafficking investigation that began with a press release announcing an illicit shark fin trade seizure in Colombia. What stood out was not what officials disclosed, but what they left out. Key elements like the exporter’s identity, permit details, and the legality of the shipment were absent from official statements.
Each of these omissions became a lead for Castro. By combining elements of a previous leak, Narco Files, with public business registries and corporate filings, Castro’s team identified the exporter, whose legal representative was the son of a former Cali Cartel leader.
“You have to build your own record. Government documents alone will not give you the truth,” she said. In maritime crime, she added, these unexplained gaps in documentation often point to where illegal activity is hidden. Her approach is widely applicable beyond wildlife trafficking.
One of Castro’s most useful tools was a structured FOIA matrix. Over nine months, the team filed more than 45 information requests to Colombian agencies, including fisheries authorities, tax and customs offices, and maritime regulators.
Castro’s team created a structured spreadsheet to keep track of the FOIA requests, listing each agency, the objective of the request, and the responses received. This system became essential to stay aligned with the story’s goals over nine months of reporting.
FOIA responses, combined with on-the-ground reporting in Colombia, Venezuela, and Hong Kong, allowed the team to piece together key elements of the shipment and identify gaps in the company’s permits. Castro emphasized that this kind of multi-agency request strategy is replicable for many cross-border ocean investigations.
Indonesian reporter Abdus Somad of Jaring.id presented a complementary methodology: combining AIS vessel tracking with open source reporting from local communities.
Somad started with AIS (Automatic Identification System) data, but warned that illegal operators often turn off transponders, spoof their location, or make suspicious course changes. “When the AIS signal disappears, that’s when the real investigation starts,” he said.
That is why Somad uses a multi-layered verification process:
This hybrid digital-community model helps reporters fill gaps in data and document illegal fishing operations even in remote areas.
Indonesian reporter Abdus Somad of Jaring.id discusses combining AIS vessel tracking with open source reporting from local communities at GIJC25. Image: Alyaa Abdul Aziz Alhadjri for GIJN
Returning to the broader picture, Dalby encouraged journalists to follow how countries might implement the BBNJ and the future Global Plastics treaties. Issues ripe for investigation include:
These emerging frameworks will shape ocean governance for years, offering reporters new entry points for investigations.
The session offered a set of clear starting points for reporters:
Environmental crime at sea remains underreported, but the tools and strategies presented at GIJC25 show that even in the world’s least governed spaces, evidence can be found, and stories can be told.
2025-12-02 16:00:15
With traditional revenue streams continuing to decline, newsrooms are reimagining how to fund investigative reporting. Their most promising solutions go beyond paywalls and donation drives and focus instead on centering their readers and redefining the relationship they have with the audiences they serve.
“Instead of asking how we can get our audiences to care about our journalism, how about showing our audiences that we deeply care about them?” said Florence Wild, the chief development officer at CORRECTIV, a Berlin- and Essen-based newsroom.
During a panel at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in Malaysia, Wild and other journalists shared insights into a changing dynamic between newsrooms and their audiences. When people feel invited to participate, collaborate, and help drive real-world change, they go from being passive readers to engaged collaborators and, ultimately, financial investors in journalism they value.
CORRECTIV has no paywall, no membership system, not even an email wall, yet operates on an annual budget of roughly €10 million (US$11.5 million) a year, explained Wild.
What they do have is a daily newsletter that generates a daily conversation and feedback loop with readers. “Sometimes we do surveys. Sometimes we do a choose-your-own-adventure style of investigations where we ask people to share tips or expert knowledge to help us while we’re working on an investigation,” said Wild.
This, combined with other innovative outreach strategies, has resulted in a revenue stream where about 60–65% comes from recurring and one-off donations, and the remaining 35% comes from philanthropic donations.
One of their investigations, which revealed that high-ranking politicians from Germany’s far-right party were plotting the forced deportations of millions of people living in Germany, drove more than three million people to the streets across the country in protest. It was the largest pro-democracy mobilization since the reunification of Germany.
One week after publication, the story was translated and performed as a reading on a theater stage, where another part of the investigation previously not reported was revealed. The performance was also live-streamed on the CORRECTIV website and through the public broadcasters, amplifying its reach. Additionally, the report was translated into 10 languages, including easy and sign language, “to make sure that everyone who was most affected by this secret plan would be able to understand the message of the investigation,” said Wild.
The harassment and threats against the reporters surged, but so did donations.
Wild said the CORRECTIV model is built on the radical idea that everyone can be a journalist. The nonprofit freely shares its methodology and research tools, teaches reporting strategies through its online academy, and also has the CORRECTIV Crowdnewsroom, which offers other strategies for reader involvement and participation.
Florence Wild, chief development officer at CORRECTIV, speaking at the GIJC25 in Kuala Lumpur. Image: Zahid Hassan for GIJN
For French investigative nonprofit Disclose, impact is at the center of their reporting strategy and a key motivation of their supporter base.
“We explain to our audience how we are useful… Don’t support us for the sake of investigative journalism, support us because ultimately our investigations could lead to change and improve our society,” said Pierre Leibovici, environment editor at Disclose.
The Disclose Team has invested in trying to generate impact after every investigation, measuring impact, and communicating the impact to audiences.
One week after the publication of their investigations, which cover topics such as environmental crime and illegal arms trade, call-outs for donations are sent out.
Parallel to this, the newsroom tracks about 20 categories of impact that include government responses, legal actions, public mobilization, protests, and policy changes, as well as tips sent by citizen reporters or crowd fact-checking. Each of these outcomes is meticulously recorded in a database and reported back to readers through an annual impact report that is free to access. A donation call-out campaign is also launched during the release of the yearly impact report.
Throughout the year, Disclose sends “impact emails” after publication, updating the readers who engaged most with the story, sometimes even months after a story was published.
Leibovici recalled an impact email they sent to readers 28 months after an investigation into an offshore LNG terminal. The state ultimately mandated TotalEnergies’ CEO to dismantle the project.
“These kinds of emails about long-term impacts are important to build loyalty with our audience and to show them why they have to support us,” said Leibovici.
Sustainable journalism is not about squeezing out donations or revenue but more about cultivating relationships — reporters and readers are partners who are both contributing and investing in a shared vision of change for the better.
Create new ways for audiences to experience and engage with the story.
Experiment with alternative payment channels.
Sanne Breimer, of SembraMedia, was the research manager for Global Project Oasis, which mapped the business models, revenue strategies, and sustainability practices of hundreds of digital-native newsrooms.
In countries where supporting newsrooms through subscriptions or donations is not a popular practice, experimenting with alternative payment channels can be a way to break through resistance.
General Enumero, a Brazilian outlet, is experimenting with PIX, Brazil’s instant, no-fee payment system, which allows people to make one-off donations and contributions. General Enumero launched an experiment using PIX tied to an investigative story series on Indigenous women for COP30 in Belém, Brazil.
Transparency is essential
Whether revenue comes from donations, memberships, or grants, newsrooms have to be open about their funding sources and spending. Transparency is the backbone of credibility that assures audiences that their support does not compromise independence, but rather strengthens it
Hire a salesperson
According to Breimer, one of the strongest findings from SembraMedia’s global research was that investing in a revenue-focused staff member dramatically increases income. In some European newsrooms, the study found a dramatic jump in revenue if the outlets have a combination of a finance person, a tech person, and a sales person.
“Sometimes it feels like chicken and egg. We don’t have the money to invest. But then… if you do invest in a person with these skills, it will also come back to you,” said Breimer.
2025-12-01 16:00:51
“Raise your hand if you have been approached by a scammer in any way,” said Frontline investigative reporter Martha Mendoza, moderator of the “Scams and Scammers” session during the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25). Most of the attendees raised their hands.
“Now turn to the person next to you and tell them how you were approached by a scammer,” she added, and the murmur of stories filled the room.
Law enforcement, governments, social media platforms, and even most newsrooms don’t fully commit to fighting the growing scourge of online fraud, even when scamming is spreading on par with drug trafficking and causes serious financial and emotional damage.
But journalists like Lian Buan, senior investigative reporter at Rappler, Emmanuel K. Dogbevi, founder and managing editor of Ghana Business News, Paul Radu, cofounder and head of innovation at OCCRP, and Mendoza are using data journalism, mapping, whistleblowers, undercover work, and traditional reporting methods to reveal a criminal activity that, according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, siphons US$1.03 trillion a year globally.
“And if you think about the lack of restrictions on cryptocurrency combined with the rapid development of AI, the place where these scams are going is quite frightening,” Mendoza noted.
When suddenly there was a boom of PhDs in Ghana, and businesspeople who had money or were politically connected began insisting on being called “doctors,” Dogbevi sensed something was amiss.
“They go to events to speak, and everybody introduces them like ‘Doctor So and So,’ but they do not exude that kind of sense of someone with a proper Ph.D., so I decided to look into it,” Dogbevi said.
After an acquaintance revealed the name of the so-called university from which he received the Ph.D., Dogbevi found its email and physical address online. But a Google Maps street view search revealed that, instead of a higher education institution, the address shown was just a dump site in London. Digging deeper, he reached out to the company by email asking how he could get a Ph.D. and received an enthusiastic reply with a list of prices and degrees, and an offer to get a Ph.D. after taking a one-week marketing seminar in Dubai.
After Dogbevi’s team revealed the scam, Ghana’s Ministry of Education announced a crackdown.
Some helpful tips:
To detect scams, OCCRP’s Paul Radu also suggests you ask yourself the following questions:
If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” dig further. You may be on the path to revealing a scam.
Once you’re certain you’ve detected a scam and you’ve collected initial information, it’s time to determine how far-reaching the structure is. Your run-of-the-mill scam might be operated by very large transnational operations linked to criminal syndicates, which involve other kinds of criminality, like money laundering, fraud, political corruption, human trafficking, and forced labor.
Mendoza described guarded compounds in Myanmar that look like business parks, with hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of people conducting phone and online scams with servers connected to Starlink. Southeast Asia workers with English skills are tricked into working in IT, then smuggled into Myanmar, and their income, which usually comes from scamming victims, is mostly spent within the same compound — in stores and with sex workers that are also trafficking victims.
As with other crimes, scamming snowballs. Small-time criminals might soon find out that they cannot operate without yielding to a larger ring, a more powerful criminal, or needing underground “angel investor” money to take their scam to the next level.
Scamming operations may also be linked to high-level politicians. Rappler’s Lian Buan described how Alice Leal Guo, a Chinese woman who posed as Filipino, ran a rapidly growing scam hub, the Philippines Offshore Gaming Operators (POGOs), from a town where she was mayor. “When I got assigned POGO, I wanted to know who in the government did this. I’m very cynical that way. I always think that there’s some powerful person behind this,” Buan said.
Her reporting revealed links between POGO and the Duterte government, and in a rare instance of accountability — for a crime with alarmingly high levels of impunity — Leal Guo was sentenced to life imprisonment for human trafficking.
Rappler’s Lian Buan discusses her investigation into a scam operation’s links to the Philippine government at a GIJC25 panel. Image: Samsul Said, Alt Studio for GIJN
Here are more tips from Buan:
OCCRP’s Paul Radu highlighted the challenges of investigating scams that operate as very wide criminal networks, and the importance of collaboration in reporting on them: “It takes a network to fight a network,” he explained. And to understand how that network is set up and operated, he suggested thinking like a criminal.
Questions to drive your reporting:
“For criminals, this is a business, and crime is a commodity. They can buy packages to conduct these kinds of crimes from the black market, such as stolen identities, fake personas online, and malware,” said Radu.
A key point: once criminals set up scamming centers, they start earning a lot of money, and will need to launder the money and access other criminal systems. In a rapidly growing business they’ll need police and politicians to look the other way, and if they expand, they’ll need that in more than one country, and a small operation will become a criminal network like the one OCCRP exposed with its partners in their transnational investigation, Scam Empire, a collaborative effort by dozens of media partners that looks into the heart of this dark industry.
Even if the data is financial, the stories are human. Behind each scam is a person who was psychologically abused, maybe even tortured, and whose money, sometimes their retirement fund or their life savings, was taken from them through blackmail or deceit.
The panelists urged the assembled reporters to use their coverage to demand better guardrails and accountability from governments, tech companies, and institutions that enable scammers through direct business support or overly lax regulations and policies. Also, to push for asset seizure operations that could restore victims’ lost funds. In many cases, the authorities know or can find out where these assets are.
If enough media outlets coordinate a worldwide simultaneous release of stories that shakes public opinion and discourse in the same way the Panama Papers did, maybe law enforcement, legislators, and companies will be forced to act, and accountability will come to bear on a pervasive criminal empire.
2025-11-28 16:00:01
Around the world, access to essential medicines often depends less on scientific breakthroughs than on the market power of a few companies. Highly concentrated pharmaceutical markets can keep prices far above production costs, block competition, and leave patients dependent on expensive brands. The consequences are visible in hospitals and homes: rationed doses, skipped treatments, and families spending a significant share of their income simply to stay alive.
At the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in Kuala Lumpur, investigative journalist Fabiola Torres offered a practical framework for exposing how these oligopolies are built and maintained. Torres, the founder of the Peruvian health investigations outlet Salud con Lupa, led the project Your Money or Your Health, which examined why insulin remains unaffordable in Peru despite the invention being more than a century old.
Her central message was clear: “Investigating oligopolies of the pharma is about people’s lives. It is about inequality. What they do may be legal, but it’s a scandal.”
Torres began the workshop with a case study familiar across the region: insulin. The original, 100-year-old, off-patent “human insulin” version of the drug should be cheap, widely available, and is recommended as the first-line treatment in international guidelines. But companies steer doctors and national guidelines toward newer patented “analogs” and device-based versions, making the original, affordable medicine harder to access.
Three companies, Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, and Sanofi, control roughly 90% of the global market. Their newer, analog versions remain under layers of fresh patents and device protections, creating what Torres called a “modern patent barrier” around an old drug.
In Peru, insulin manufacturers and importers receive tax exemptions, but prices have not fallen. Public hospitals frequently experience shortages, forcing patients to buy insulin privately, often spending 10–20% of a monthly minimum wage. When hospitals run out, people ration doses or go without, leading to complications, disability, or death.
Torres’s team discovered that in 2024, a new clinical guidance was issued in Peru that made an insulin analog the first-line treatment. “The draft changed at the last moment… the description was for Novo Nordisk’s insulin analogs,” she explained.
A key contributor to the guideline was a leading diabetes specialist who also heads a Novo Nordisk–funded pediatric diabetes program, a financial connection not reflected in the documentation circulated to the public.
The case illustrated how market power, regulation, and medical guidance intersect, and how journalists can follow each thread.
The session in Kuala Lumpur. Image: Zahid Hassan for GIJN
Torres described how pharmaceutical oligopolies create a series of structural walls that determine who can access a medicine, and who cannot.
Torres said this concentrated market power allows a handful of companies to set the terms: which medicines enter the market, at what price. She explained how the oligopolies block cheaper, older, or biosimilar alternatives from reaching patients, who are ultimately paying the price.
When a drug patent is coming to an end, “companies file new patents on very small changes,” Torres said. This often allows them to maintain their lucrative patent rights with just minor modifications: altered doses, updated devices, or manufacturing tweaks.
Many countries lack complete frameworks for approving biosimilars, the lower-cost alternatives to complex biological drugs. In Peru, a biosimilar insulin has been approved since 2016, but remains constrained by regulatory gaps. Torres explained. Without clear guidance, Torres explained, doctors are less willing to prescribe biosimilar options.
Clinical guidelines adopted by each country are essential in shaping the prescribing habits and purchasing decisions. Peru’s guideline revisions demonstrated how undisclosed conflicts of interest can influence national policy, and shift markets toward corporate interest and higher-priced products.
Shortages, fragmented purchasing, and budget cuts make consistent access difficult. Torres documented long queues, reuse of syringes, and out-of-pocket purchases among families unable to obtain insulin through the public system.
Companies fund medical events, training, and donation programs, often without transparent disclosure. “Most of the medical events are funded by the companies,” Torres noted. Donation programs from companies can often act as a commercial strategy to influence doctors and create market preference for their patented products.
These relationships can subtly shape prescribing norms and delay the uptake of lower-cost options.
Pharmaceutical oligopolies shape access to life-saving treatments, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Torres emphasized that uncovering these structures requires attention not only to patents and regulations, but also to the “human impact” behind each barrier.
Torres offered practical steps for reporters investigating medicine markets:
For Torres, the lesson is that these markets can be understood and therefore challenged. With the right tools, journalists can expose the structures behind high prices and limited competition and help inform the public. The first step, she said, is simple: choose one medicine, follow its path through the system, and see where the trail leads.
2025-11-27 16:00:49
Religion is an intrinsic part of people’s lives — influencing communities, countries, and sociopolitical developments. But these very factors make reporting on religions and faiths challenging.
Journalists from New Zealand, Colombia, and Peru spoke at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in a session titled “Uncovering Stories Connected to Religious Groups” about how to find stories and angles when reporting on issues linked with religious groups and faith-based cults.
A big challenge when reporting on religion is terminology, said Anusha Bradley, an investigative reporter with Radio New Zealand. “Learn the lingo of the religion. You have to understand what they are saying,” she explained. Religions tend to have their own terminology and words, with specific meanings that may be unfamiliar to someone trying to investigate them for the first time.
“Understand the top-down structure,” she added. Many religions operate as a business, and it helps to understand the hierarchy and the way the institution is constructed. It is also important to understand power, control, and coercion — and how they are linked with the religious institution.
Bradley cited her reporting on the impact of shunning and child protection policies among Jehovah’s Witnesses in New Zealand. Her investigation uncovered how the religious group controls access to justice for victims of various forms of abuse. “There would be victims of domestic abuse, and they were told to pray harder,” she said. “Sexual abuse would require the presence of two witnesses [to confirm that the abuse occurred]” — practices that effectively blocked accountability and justice for victims and protected abusers.
Colombian journalist Juan Pablo Barrientos has been facing harassment for close to a decade for his extensive reporting and investigation into reports of the sexual abuse of minors in the Catholic Church in his home country.
Barrientos was attempting to analyze how the Catholic Church, as an important national institution in Colombia, handled cases of priests accused of pedophilia. The title of Barriento’s investigation, “The Secret Archive,” refers to a section in the Code of Canon Law — which governs the Catholic Church — that decrees the establishment of an archive that is to be locked up and “protected most securely,” containing records of what the Canon describes as “criminal cases in matters of morals,” including a brief summary of what occurred.
“This, to me, is a criminal confession,” said Barrientos. This archive was critical to his investigation. The Catholic Church blocked access for years, and Barrientos and another journalist took their fight to access these church records in Colombia to court.
“Article 44 of the Constitution of Colombia says that the rights of minors prevail over all other rights,” said Barrientos. “The court argued that this is private information. But [we] were not asking for medical records, for financial records, for the sexual orientation of the priests. [We were] asking for information on crimes committed against children,” he added.
In June 2025, the Colombian Constitutional Court upheld the journalists’ rights to access — based on the constitutional principle of child protection — information about priests in the context of investigations into alleged sexual abuse.
Paola Ugaz, the Peru correspondent for the Spanish daily newspaper ABC, has for years investigated allegations of sexual, physcial, and psychological abuse against minors by Sodalicio Christianae Vitae (SCV), a powerful Catholic organization founded in Peru in the 1970s. After a book she worked on with former Sodalicio member Pedro Salinas, titled “Mitad Monjes, Mitad Soldados” (“Half Priests, Half Soldiers”) was published in 2015, she experienced retaliation — including various forms of targeted harassment and a criminal defamation complaint by people associated with SCV.
In April 2025, the Vatican formalized the dissolution of SCV.
The “Aha!” moment can come at any time during investigations, the panelists said, and shared a few general pointers for investigating powerful religious groups.
Bradley suggested checking the document trail. “The congregation would document the meetings they had, and the secretary would file everything” about those discussions within the church, said Bradley. “Many members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who retired or left [the church], took these documents with them.” She also noted that “every victim has a story… so it’s important to show a pattern by exposing the system.”
Barrientos urged journalists not to be afraid to ask questions of the Catholic Church in their own cities: “Ask for that secret archive that is in every one of your cities… Every city that has a Catholic Church… they have these secret archives.”
2025-11-26 16:00:26
When Russian customs data for coal exports is sorted not by price, but by tonnage, an obscure company suddenly stands out. It is registered to a small building on the outskirts of the southern border city of Rostov-on-Don, next to a car repair shop and a construction store.
The paper trail shows that this enterprise shipped nearly half a million tons of coal abroad in two years, mainly to Turkey. The coal is declared “Russian,” but in reality, reporters say that the product comes from mines in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. An investigation by the independent outlet iStories reported that this firm, Energoresurs, is closely linked to Oleksandr Yanukovych, the son of ousted Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, and that the profits are routed through an offshore company while the war continues.
At the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in Malaysia, the author of that investigation, iStories’ Maria Zholobova, joined Jelena Cosic from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), Armando.Info’s Joseph Poliszuk, and Indonesian visual investigations producer and OSINT researcher Aqwam Fiazmi Hanifan, who works for Narasi.
Together they explained how they build dossiers on oligarchs, mine corporate and sanctions databases, construct their own datasets, and combine leaks, customs records, and local registries — all while navigating the legal and security risks that come with investigating powerful figures that may not want you digging into their corporate exploits..
For Jelena Cosic, every oligarch investigation begins in the same place: with a person and a spreadsheet.
“We always should start, no matter who we research, with these things,” she told the panel. Reporters should record basic identifiers — date of birth, addresses, passport numbers — all spelling variants of names, relatives and in-laws, business partners, offshore companies, and intermediaries. “Each line in the spreadsheet is a verified piece of information that can later be searched, filtered, and cross-referenced.
“Each row you would fill with another [piece of] information,” she said. “It will help you once you are stuck somewhere and you’re not sure where to go next.”
The second step is to feed that spreadsheet with documents. At ICIJ, Cosic’s team uses Datashare, an open source tool that can be installed locally. Reporters can scan and upload printed documents to make them searchable, while large PDF dumps can become an internal archive where names, addresses, and companies can be found across thousands of pages in seconds.
Court records are another priority — “the gold mine for many of these guys,” Cosic noted.
Image: Screenshot, IStories
Once the basic profile is built, Cosic connects people to corporate and sanctions data.
ICIJ has published searchable databases from its major projects — including Offshore Leaks and Pandora Papers — that contain profiles of “power players” and “confidential clients” and link to original corporate records and legal filings. Many of these documents are also available on DocumentCloud, a widely used repository used by investigative centers.
Among open data tools, Cosic highlighted:
She also recommended OpenSanctions, which aggregates sanctions lists from multiple jurisdictions and, crucially, all major spelling variants of sanctioned individuals’ names.
For politically exposed persons, Cosic mentioned specialized PEP databases she uses to double-check whether she has missed any companies tied to a target. And while commercial databases such as Sayari or Orbis can be costly, she urged newsrooms to negotiate temporary or discounted access, sometimes in exchange for credit in published stories.
Maria Zholobova’s investigation shows how customs data and leaked databases can be combined to map opaque trade schemes.
Instead of looking at prices, which can be manipulated, she sorted several years of Russian coal exports by shipment weight. Among them, she noticed an unfamiliar company that, since 2023, had converted into a much bigger player: a firm registered at a modest address in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.
Corporate records showed that the company had taken loans from firms registered in the occupied Ukrainian territories and from entities linked to the former president, Viktor Yanukovych, and to his son’s business network. To identify the real owners and managers, Zholobova turned to an ecosystem of leaks and unofficial data markets that have emerged as official registers in Russia have closed: databases from banks, mobile operators, and taxi services, often accessed through Telegram bots.
By checking employment histories and how phone numbers were saved in other people’s contact lists, she found that the nominal owners and directors were, in fact, employees of companies associated with Yanukovych’s structures.
Foreign journalists may need to cooperate with Russian-speaking reporters when investigating similar networks, because this work depends on Russian-language materials and informal channels.
Joseph Poliszuk spoke about the experience of the Venezuelan investigative outlet Armando.info in tracking the oligarchs that circled around former president Hugo Chávez, and are now linked to his successor, Nicolás Maduro.
Poliszuk’s investigations in Venezuela focus on the “boliburgueses” – business people who have become wealthy through their proximity to the Bolivarian government.
One of them was the government’s leading food supplier — but investigations into the quality of the food his organization was paid to deliver to the hungry, and especially the powdered milk delivered to poor households, found it to be nutritionally inadequate. Reporters combined trade data, corporate documents, and laboratory tests to show this.
“We tested eight brands of the milk of the government,” Poliszuk recalled. “In one of the cases… one normal glass of milk was the same as 41 glasses of that kind of milk that they were giving to the people.”
The investigation led to a defamation case and pressure on the newsroom; after an insider warned that authorities planned to visit reporters’ homes, some team members left the country, and many of them now operate from exile.
In other projects, Armando.info reporters relied on property and corporate records. In one, they showed how the family of Venezuela’s first lady had bought out an entire street — 14 houses — using a proxy owner who was a former classmate. Proving ownership required cadastre documents, social media, off-the-record sources, and cross-checks with a separate court case in Miami.
When official data was missing, the newsroom searched elsewhere to build their own databases. Reporters compiled a national contracts registry from scattered documents and matched it against lists of generals and senior officials, exposing an oligarch who secured the state’s best contracts. They also matched the names of Chavez and Maduro officials with company records in Miami, finding that many had businesses — and often homes — in the United States.
Indonesian journalist Aqwam Fiazmi Hanifan showed how local registries and OSINT tools can reveal oligarch networks in Indonesia. Many corporate records are only available by purchasing documents from the Ministry of Law.
The AHU database lets you search profiles of Indonesian limited liability companies and view both a “latest profile” (current status, address, directors, and a snapshot of shareholders) and a “full profile” with the company’s complete legal history, including all changes to deeds, shares, and management. It also helps you trace ownership structures by showing direct shareholders, multi-layered corporate chains, nominee owners, and offshore vehicles, including those registered in jurisdictions like Hong Kong and Singapore.
“Oligarchs don’t just put the money into mining or private banks,” Hanifan said. “Sometimes they also put [it] into different businesses like coffee shops, restaurants, and football clubs. By hiding the real owners behind multiple layers of companies and using football clubs as a public face, wealthy people in Indonesia can quietly move and launder money, mask conflicts of interest, and shield other shady businesses from scrutiny.”
In one project that used the AHU database, Hanifan mapped a complex ownership structure behind a professional football club, showing links back to extractive industries.
For phone-based research, Hanifan uses Getcontact, which shows how a number is saved in other users’ address books, and OSINT Industries, which maps social media accounts linked to a given phone or email. But he warned that using data from breaches or leaks can be risky under Indonesia’s IT law. “You can be arrested,” he said.
The panelists agreed on several core lessons:
Inna Gadzynska is a Ukrainian journalist with nearly 20 years of experience in print and online media. She worked as a media trainer for almost 8 years, conducting trainings on storytelling and editorial workflow. Since 2019 she has been working as an editor at the Ukrainian data journalism newsroom Texty.org.ua. Gadzynska was among the nominees of the European Press Prize for innovations in 2024, and among the winners of the Ukrainian national competition Honor of the Profession in 2023. Gadzynska also worked as an associate regional editor at GIJN in 2019.
