38 November 2014
23
Lithuania
32
I
WAS at a global conference in Rio late
last year listening to Glenn Greenwald
declare journalism in a “golden age”.
Greenwald is the reporter credited with
breaking the Edward Snowden story.
He said the profession’s largest institu-
tions are experiencing tough times because
of the changing way people consume news.
This was not something to be sad about –
rather we should be happy about it.
“The media institutions are failing and
it’s a great thing to celebrate”, he said.
Journalism isn’t dying. It’s thriving and just
going to other places.”
At the same conference, the day before,
David Leigh also declared that journal-
ism was in a new “golden age”. Leigh is the
recently retired investigations editor of The
Guardian newspaper, the paper that first
carried the Snowden stories.
Leigh’s argument was this: it is a golden
age because investigative journalists are
coming together in new forms of collabo-
rations using fresh technology.
And this dynamic is producing
unprecedented levels of transparency and
impact. “We are in the age of collaboration”,
Leigh said.
The Guardian has been involved in three
of the biggest such investigative projects in
the last three years.
Leigh cited the Wikileaks collaboration
that released hundreds of thousands of
secret US diplomatic cables; the most recent
Snowden disclosures of secret data collec-
tion by the US National Security Agency; and
a story that I was involved with that broke
worldwide in April 2013 that has since
become known as Offshore Leaks.
Once upon a time in Australia a man came
along who claimed to have invented a magic
pill. You put this pill in your motor vehicle
and suddenly your fuel lasted 20 per cent
longer. What’s more, the pill managed to
eliminate all of the toxic emissions.
The Australian Trade Commission wanted
to believe so badly it had an entire section
of its website devoted to the success of this
company.
The company got nearly €300,000 in tax-
payer grants for sales that had never been
made.
It had no factories; it had no trucks – in
fact, it had no actual product for sale at all.
But it had penetrated deeply into
Australia’s elite. Many of them secretly held
shares in the company and they too thought
they were going to be rich.
So when I exposed all this as a fraud I spent
my time defending the lawsuits, attacks in
the Australian senate and I went through
the despair and doubt that all investigative
reporters are put through when powerful
people don’t want something made public.
This firm had been sending the money it
was getting from selling shares to the British
Virgin Islands and to other tax havens and
then bringing the money back to Australia,
as if it were sales of the magic pill.
As long as new investors could be found,
and the price of the shares continued to rise,
the game went on.
It continued for nearly 18 months even
after I exposed it as a fraud, until finally the
company stopped paying the lawyers who
MEDIA
Also in this section:
Pat Kenny 42
Cleraun Conference 45
Eden, not Apocalypse
The imperative for honest,
responsive, investigative,
collaborative, value-adding
gatekeeping journalism.
By Gerard Ryle
arrival; of digital age
November 2014 39
were suing me.
By then I realised that I was staring at
something much bigger – a secret universe
that allowed this kind of thing to happen.
And my pill company was only a small part
of it.
After I wrote the book about the magic
pill, a mysterious package
arrived in the mail. It was a com-
puter hard-drive – the kind you
can buy in any store. But this one
was packed with a hoard of doc-
uments – the biggest stockpile
of inside information about the
offshore tax haven system ever
obtained by a journalist.
We are talking 2.5 million
secret records.
The total size of the files, if you
were to measure it in gigabytes,
was more than 160 times larger
than the U.S. State Department
documents given to Wikileaks.
There were 120,000 clients
from all over the world, from
nearly 170 different coun-
tries. There were Americans …
Russians … Irish …
But this presented me with a
dilemma
I had spent most of my career
as an investigative reporter. We fiercely
protect our secrets, at times even from our
editors because we know that the minute
they hear what we are working on they want
it right away.
To be frank, when we find a good story
we also like to keep the glory for ourselves.
But it’s funny how life sometimes throws up
opportunities in batches.
A few months after I got the hard drive in
the mail, I got an email from my old profes-
sor at the University of Michigan,
He was on a board that ran an outfit
called the International Consortium of
Investigative Journalists.
This is a non-profit organisation head-
quartered in Washington DC that oversees
some of the best investigative journalists
in the world.
It brings them together to work on cross
border projects.
He told me they were looking for some-
body new to run the network – how did I
fancy living in Washington for a few years?
And the data I had was a total mess and
extremely hard to read. It contained nearly
30 years of records taken from people who
set up offshore accounts for clients.
Going, sometimes four deep, into each of
these folders I found emails, random PDFs
with passport and home addresses, and
spreadsheets with the names of thousands
of clients.
I began doing what many other reporters
would do after me. I began looking for big
names. But the story I was looking at was
not about big names.
The real value of what I had was an unprec-
edented look into a secret
world. The same secret world
I had a glimpse of when I was
researching the magic pill.
This is a world whose very
product is secrecy. That’s what
it sells.
And this anonymity allows
some individuals and corpora-
tions to gain tax advantages not
available to average people.
It allows frauds like the
magic pill company.
It can also pit economies
and entire nations against one
another. You just have to look
at the Greek fiscal disaster,
which has been largely blamed
on offshore tax cheating. Or the
banking meltdown in Cyprus.
Both the Bernie Madoff ponzi
scheme and Enron relied on tax
havens. It’s now estimated that
half of all world trade, and one
third of all world wealth goes through tax
havens. If these people and companies are
not paying their fair share of taxes, you are
paying more.
Remember the consortium I mentioned?
Well, more than 100 of those investiga-
tive reporters went to work in more than 50
countries!
Being a non-profit, we few people at the
core of it worked on a shoestring, using
donated software and free tools like
skype.
Our early mornings would be spent talk-
ing to Europe, and our nights to Asia and
New Zealand.
But somehow, together, over a period
of about one and a half years we created
the biggest collaboration in journalism
history.
On April 4th last year, at exactly one
minute past midnight, Berlin time, we pub-
lished simultaneously with major media
partners in 35 countries.
What we did changed laws from Columbia
to Belgium and more changes are promised
right across Europe, possibly even here in
Ireland because of new initiatives being
demanded by the European Union.
Hundreds of people began receiving
‘please explain’ letters from authorities.
And we know authorities all over the world
have sought to recover tens of millions of
dollars already.
The five richest nations in Europe
got together and agreed to share tax
information.
Recently, David Cameron introduced a
new law that would make public the true
owners of British companies.
We were credited with putting tax eva-
sion on the agendas of the both the G8 and
the G20 and we have been responsible for
official inquiries in Bangladesh, India,
Denmark, Austria, Belgium, Greece, South
Korea, the Philippines.
And in October we followed it up with a
thirty-partner exposé of secret tax deals
with Luxembourg, in ‘LuxLeaks’.
But why is all this a big deal?
Well, as we heard in Rio, journalism is in
crisis. The business models that sustained
investigative reporting are broken. So you
can imagine the pressure and the ego dra-
mas that could have killed this.
The trust level had to be so high.
Any one of these journalists could have
gone with the story on their own.
But they didn’t.
The fairytale ending to this part of my talk
is this: it worked. We showed there are alter-
natives to the Wikileaks method
of just dumping raw information
on the Internet.
What we perfected along the
way was a potential new model
for journalism.
We showed how just a handful
of journalists can effect change
across the world by applying new
technology and old fashioned
shoe leather to vast amounts of
leaked information.
Together, we provided all-
important context to what had
originally been delivered to me
via the computer hard-drive.
We put the power back into
the hands of journalists – using
watchdog journalism methods
for assessing what was impor-
tant and what was not.
We also applied journalism
ethics to the release of infor-
mation and took time to dig deep – much
deeper and longer that most media allow
these days.
Instead of embracing the advances
brought by the internet, journalists like to
blame it for all our current woes.
I believe that at least some of our problems
are a lot more fundamental.
Long before the internet came along, we
had already begun to move away from what
We are in
the age of
collaboration.
The Guardian
has been
involved in
three of the
biggest such
investigative
projects in the
last three years
“
5 million secret
records, more
than 160 times
larger than the
documents
given to
Wikileaks.
There were
Americans …
Russians …
Irish …
“