Day 1 of #UNCOVERED 2021

Celebrating cross-border journalism with praise and prizes

By Jane Whyatt (ECPMF)

There were sad and sombre moments at the #UNCOVERED 2021 online conference, remembering murdered journalists Giorgios Kavaitaz, Daphne Caruana Galizia, and Jàn Kuciak.

Yet the atmosphere was mostly one of celebration, with top-level speakers stressing the importance of cross-border investigative journalism and four teams collecting handsome trophies as well as 5,555 euros each in the first-ever IJ4EU Impact Award.

Sabine Verheyen MEP, who chairs the European Parliament Culture Committee, stressed in the opening panel discussion, chaired by European Centre for Press and Media Freedom Lutz Kinkel:

“We have increased the budget – nearly doubling it – for Creative Europe. To support investigative journalism is one of the core tasks we should concentrate on”

Backing up this promise, the European Commission’s Anna Herold told the online audience of more than 300 registrants:

”We’re extremely proud of this project where full independence of the media is ensured by the arm’s length approach”.

The FinCEN Files

Global teamwork defying the COVID-19 pandemic

Discussing how the FinCEN Files exposed massive money laundering, Fergus Shiel of the International Center for investigative Journalism (ICIJ) told the conference how  – in spite of the pandemic lockdown – they were able to track a billion dollars from Turkmenistan to Scotland, and follow another money trail from Hong Kong to California, where it led to the death of a man. “This is what investigative journalism is about” he commented.

His colleague Ariel Kaminer of BuzzFeed News found it a sobering experience, noting that some of the reporters involved work in settings where they were literally putting their lives on the line to do this work.

The next panel on Political Influence provided more examples of the dangers and difficulties facing the cross-border teams.

Moscow-based freelancer Anastasia Kirilenko told how one of their whistleblowers survived an assassination attempt and another received death threats, too. Zoltán Sipos of Átlátszó Erdély described how he and ethnic Hungarians like himself living in nearby countries such as Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Serbia and Croatia live in “a parallel reality” which is funded directly from Budapest by Viktor Orbàn’s government with the aim of spreading illiberal values and undermining democracy.

Those values spilled onto the streets of Poland’s cities when the new anti-abortion law was passed in October 2020, forcing the team investigating the ultra-conservative TFP global network to publish earlier than planned. In the panel debate chaired by Timothy Large of the international Press Institute (IPI), Anna Gilerwska explained that the TFP was collecting millions of euros from a base in Kracow by selling rosaries and pictures of saints. Then they traced the money – and political influence  – to its branches in Brazil. Slovakia, Croatia and France – where her colleague traced them to a château and found they were living in it!

There was a surprise fourth IJ4EU Impact Award winner.

Winners of the IJ4EU Impact Award

The high point of #UNCOVERED was the prizegiving ceremony. This rewarded four cross border investigations that have resulted in criminal charges or political change or changed European society in some other way.

Jury chair Shaun Walker, the Guardian newspaper’s central and eastern Europe correspondent, praised the high quality of all ten shortlisted projects. On the Lost in Europe project, he commented that all the jury members were both impressed and saddened. The team tracked the movements of Vietnamese children who had disappeared from refugee reception centres across Europe and been trafficked into the illicit drugs business and prostitution. Accepting the award on the line from the Netherlands, Geejse van Haran commented: “We learned how vulnerable children are, how important our journalistic ethics are and how important cross-border working is, because the criminals don’t respect border”.

Jury member Theresa Ribeiro, High Representative for Freedom of the Media at the organisations for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), announced the prize for The Daphne Project which continued the investigations started by murdered reporter Daphne Caruana Galizia:

“The Maltese journalist who paid the highest price for her journalists work. In times of mistrust, this work is more important than ever”.

Accepting the award on behalf of himself and the 45 journalists on the team, Jules Giraudat paid tribute to Daphne’s family, saying “I have a special thought tonight for sons Matthew, Paul and Andrew. They are a true inspiration.”

For the fourth winner, the prize came as a surprise, since only three were originally planned. Mattias Carlsson of the organized Crime And Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) explained that their project The Fraud Factory exposed a Ukraine-based global scam that was defrauding pensioners of their savings by claiming to invest them in Bitcoin. Yet although they had a whistleblower – who is now in a witness protection programme – no-one has been charged and there have been no arrests.

As conference host Ali Aslan remarked, there’s a need for a follow-up. The prize money will go to continue all the investigations, since as Lutz Kinkel rightly observed “This is money to keep on working. As we all know, the investigations are costly”.

#UNCOVERED continues on Thursday 15 April 2021. Register here or free. Registrants get access to an exclusive film screening.

2021 #IJ4EU Impact Award winners announced

The Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) fund announced on Wednesday four winners of its inaugural #IJ4EU Impact Award celebrating excellence in cross-border investigative reporting.

In no particular order, the winning investigations were:

Selected by an independent jury, the team behind each investigation receives €5,555.

Shaun Walker is The Guardian newspaper’s central and eastern Europe correspondent and chair of the inaugural #IJ4EU Impact Award jury.

“We were all in agreement that The Daphne Project was a deserving winner, coordinating many journalists to continue Daphne Caruana Galizia’s work and having a clear and important impact,” Shaun Walker, central and eastern Europe correspondent for The Guardian newspaper and jury chair, said.

“Lost in Europe shone an important light on the terrible story of missing migrant children. The Troika Laundromat was impressive for the sheer size of the team involved, matched by the size of the vast sums of money it was investigating. The Fraud Factory was a tenacious piece of work that put human faces to a sad story of cross-border fraud.”

Walker announced the winners during a ceremony on April 14 at #UNCOVERED, the annual conference of the IJ4EU fund.

The #IJ4EU Impact Award recognises the best investigative journalism carried out by teams collaborating across frontiers in EU member states and candidate countries.

Managed by the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF) in cooperation with IJ4EU partners the International Press Institute (IPI) and the European Journalism Centre (EJC), the prize was open to investigations published in 2019 and 2020.

Jury members praised the overall quality of nominations but singled out the four winners as exceptional examples of watchdog journalism on transnational subjects.

The Daphne Project was one of the #IJ4EU Impact Award winners.

Dozens of journalists

The Daphne Project picked up the unfinished work of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed in October 2017 by a car bomb just metres from her home.

Led by Forbidden Stories, a group of 45 journalists representing 18 news organisations from 15 countries, the investigation changed the course of political life in Malta while raising awareness of the dangers facing journalists.

The Troika Laundromat was another winner of the #IJ4EU Impact Award.

The Troika Laundromat is an investigation into an $8.8 billion network of offshore companies used by Russian politicians and criminals to acquire shares in state-owned companies, buy real estate, purchase luxury yachts and more.

Led by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), it involves 1.3 million leaked banking transactions from 230,000 companies, with stories published in 19 media outlets in Europe and elsewhere.

Lost in Europe also picked up €5,555 in prize money.

Lost in Europe sought to discover what had become of thousands of migrant and refugee children who had gone missing in Europe, some falling into the hands of drug gangs and sex traffickers.

The team of investigative journalists from Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Italy and the Netherlands succeeded in bringing widespread attention to a pressing issue that transcends borders.

Fraud Factory won an #IJ4EU Impact Award too.

Fraud Factory is another OCCRP-led investigation, this time exposing the work of a Kyiv-based scamming group that targeted elderly people in Europe to defraud them of their savings.

The project includes a 15-minute video containing secret footage shot by a whistleblower at great personal risk. The jury hailed the investigation as an impressive piece of old-fashioned, cross-border journalism.

‘Fantastic shortlist’

The jury chose the IJ4EU Impact Award winners from a shortlist of 10 nominations drawn up by independent evaluators assembled by ECPMF.

“It was a fantastic shortlist to choose from and it took some time to come to agreement because all of the entries were strong in different ways — some were wide-ranging cross-border cooperations involving dozens of journalists, while others were much more narrow in focus but nonetheless brilliant pieces of journalistic work,” Walker said.

“None of these stories could have been reported in only one country and all four winners showed, in different ways, the benefits of working across borders in our interconnected world.”

In addition to Walker, the jury members were Christian Jensen, executive editor-in-chief of Danish newspaper Politiken; Nassira el Moaddem, an award-winning French journalist, author and TV show host; Teresa Ribeiro, representative on freedom of the media for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe; and Andrzej Rojek, a Polish-born US philanthropist and freedom-of-speech advocate.

The complete #IJ4EU Impact Award jury also consisted of Christian Jensen, Nassira el Moaddem, Teresa Ribeiro, and Andrzej Rojek.

Now in its second year, IJ4EU provides grants and other forms of support to teams of journalists or news outlets in Europe investigating topics of public interest across borders.

It is led by IPI, in partnership with EJC and ECPMF, and funded by the European Commission with co-funding from Open Society Foundations, Fritt Ord, Luminate and the City of Leipzig.

In 2020, the IJ4EU fund disbursed almost €1.1 million in grant funding to 49 investigative projects. That followed a successful pilot year in 2018 during which it gave €350,000 in grants to 12 projects.

To be eligible for the IJ4EU Impact Award, teams need not have received support from the fund, but two of the winners — the Daphne Project and Lost in Europe — were grantees during the first edition of the programme.

The #IJ4EU Impact Award is part of #UNCOVERED conference.

Documentaries associated with three of the winning projects were among videos screened on the first day of #UNCOVERED.

The conference brought together journalists, funders, policymakers and civil society members to explore the highs and lows of cross-border investigative journalism.

Free registration is open for day two of the conference on April 15. See the agenda here.