The last three decades have seen the dramatic globalization of organized crime and corruption, now totaling trillions every year. An offshore-enabled criminal services industry—Western banks, law firms, registration agents, visa peddlers, hedge funds and lobbyists—has allowed corrupt actors to easily loot, launder, and hide stolen money in safe havens for future legitimate use. This unprecedented transfer of wealth and nexus of high-level corruption and organized crime has accelerated the rise of global inequality, devastated livelihoods, and contributed to the decline of democratic institutions all over the world.
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) believes it takes a network to fight a network. By developing and equipping a global network of investigative journalists and publishing their stories, OCCRP exposes crime and corruption to empower the public to hold power to account. As an investigative reporting platform for an ever-growing worldwide network of independent media reporting centers and journalists, OCCRP is reinventing investigative journalism for the 21st century as a public good. While upholding and instilling the highest journalistic ethics and editorial standards, it develops and deploys cutting-edge tech tools to enable collaborative, secure, data-driven investigations. With OCCRP Aleph, a suite of tools and data powered by in-house developed software, journalists can search and cross-reference more than 1 billion records to trace and expose criminal connections and patterns and efficiently collaborate across borders. The power of Aleph grows as the network expands with new media partners adding their data, furthering OCCRP’s ability to identify and expose illicit activity.
In the face of growing global threats to independent media, OCCRP provides digital and physical security and allows journalists covering the most sensitive material to work in teams with trusted editors rather than working alone. OCCRP also partners with advocacy groups—arming civil society with information to meaningfully press for justice and change—and unearths evidence that enables law enforcement to act. OCCRP sees a future where corruption and organized crime are drastically reduced, and democracy resurges as a result of a more informed citizenry, increased accountability, and sharply higher costs for criminal activity.
The last three decades have seen the dramatic globalization of organized crime and corruption, now totaling trillions every year.
OCCRP develops and equips a global network of investigative journalists to publish stories that expose crime and corruption and empowers the public to hold power to account.
Drew and Paul are recipients of numerous awards including the Knight Journalism Award in 2004 and the European Press Prize in 2015.
OCCRP publishes more than 100 investigations a year, a number they expect to double in 2019, making it one of the largest producers of investigative reporting in the world.
By developing and equipping a global network of investigative journalists and publishing their stories, OCCRP exposes crime and corruption to empower the public to hold power to account.
Through an innovative investigative reporting platform consisting of a cross-border network of investigative reporters, and through cutting-edge tech tools that facilitate investigative reporting focused on corruption and illicit financial flows.
Co-founder and Chief of Innovation, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project
Co-founder and Publisher, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project
Drew Sullivan and Paul Radu are the co-founders of OCCRP. Drew has been a journalist for more than two decades, having worked at the Associated Press and The Tennessean before starting OCCRP. Drew came to Bosnia in the early 2000s to train investigative journalists as part of a project funded by the U.S. government and went on to start the Bosnian Center of Investigative Reporting. During this time, he met Paul Radu, who set up an investigative journalism center in Romania, and they began working together on a story examining corruption among regional energy traders. As the scope of the story grew and the scale of the corruption transcended national borders, other journalists from the region joined the effort. The resulting story won the first Global Shining Light award from the Global Investigative Journalism Network in 2007. In the process, Paul and Drew pioneered an approach to cross-border investigative reporting that leveraged local journalists and a shared data platform, which made piecing together a story faster and more effective. They founded OCCRP with the mission of institutionalizing this approach. Between the two of them, they are recipients of numerous awards including the Knight Journalism Award in 2004 and the European Press Prize in 2015.
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