How to Combat Crime and Corruption

Corruption plagues all levels of society in countries across the world, undermining political, social and economic developments, and Iran is no exception. According to Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, the country ranks 144^th out of 177 countries assessed.

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) was set up to combat endemic corruption, focusing on Eastern Europe and Central Asia primarily, but also drawing information and experiences from elsewhere. Drew Sullivan, its founder, sought to counter criminal activities by doing investigative reporting into organized crime and corruption, thereby having a positive effect on the communities being negatively affected.

The non-profit organization, which works alongside a number of regional non-profit investigative centers and independent media, helps people from Central Asia to better understand how crime and corruption hinders their lives. It is also building an online resource of documents related to organized crime that can be used by journalists and the public to expose crime and fraud, much of which goes on behind closed doors. IranWire spoke to Drew Sullivan about how journalists and activists can develop tools for important investigative work—and the dangers involved.

Could you tell me a little about what it is the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) does, and where?

The OCCRP is an umbrella organization for non-profit and sub-commercial news media, which focuses on Eastern Europe, the former USSR states and Central Asia, but also works in Central and Latin America, where we do a lot on drug trafficking, as well as in the Middle East. We combat organized crime and corruption by doing cross-border work but we also build journalism tools and do investigative work that our member centers would find too expensive or difficult to do.

Crime and corruption are difficult topics to report on, and dangerous. So we help build capacity for organizations that are doing this on a smaller level, while we focus on the large structural issues associated with governments and their ties to organized crime and the illegal practices found at government level in some Eastern European  countries. The Balkans are the new Mexico; the area is flushed with huge amounts of drug-trafficking money, which is corrupting the system and creating criminal narco-states all the way from Russia to Montenegro.

What are some of the biggest stories you have uncovered?

We were the first people to track who made the money from the Sergei Magnitsky case, the Russian lawyer who died in prison because he’d discovered a large tax fraud committed by the Russian government. The government had claimed the relevant documents were lost in a car accident and so couldn’t work out where the money went. But we examined banking documents from Moldova and Ukraine and worked out tax officials and the Russian Minister of Transport had benefited in the incident. The minister’s son had bought 50 million dollars’ worth of Wall Street apartments.

We also showed gigantic money-laundering operations in Latvia and Russia, whereby money was laundered between government officials to the Magnitsky deal to Asian triads and to Mexican drug cartels. We’ve shown how senior members of the Serbian government have no background whatsoever in government but extensive backgrounds in organized crime and yet became high officials. We also proved how the daughter of the Uzbek president accepted a $250 million bribe from a Swedish telecom to get a 3G licence.

Do you work with citizens?

All the time. A lot of our stories come from citizens. It’s harder to do it this way because corruption is very complex, as it often deals with offshore accounts and phantoms of sorts. A citizen can become a proxy for a large criminal structure and they don’t even know it. We did a story in Georgia where a group of citizens came to us and said the lake they’d been living on for 300 years was suddenly sold off without them realizing it was even sellable and that they knew who was behind it but couldn’t prove it. We were able to show how the land was sold by the government to a wealthy politician but that it wasn’t for sale in the first place.

Breaking stories with citizens is a combination of them working out what’s going on in the trenches and our specialized expertise in breaking the veil of secrecy surrounding offshore companies. We also talk to the police, organized crime, government officials and monitor police actions and indictments to get information.

How can your work help people living under an authoritarian regime?

The only way we can help is through providing information. Our job is to tell the truth and run. We’re not there to change governments, although our work has lead to prime ministers being fired. The idea is we give people the information they need and eventually they become empowered. But it’s harder when you live in an authoritarian regime like Russia because you are bombarded with misinformation. The state media is a propaganda tool, so a citizen needs to be really committed to finding out the truth.

Is your work dangerous?

We’ve had our reporters arrested and our organization is sued frequently. We’re challenged both by organized crime and governments, and the most dangerous part is the nexus between the two. It’s citizens who own businesses that are the most mistreated by governments, which are acting on behalf of organized crime. Organized crime is rapidly becoming the business sector in some countries. Often [those involved] aren’t business-savvy enough to do good business so it represses small businesses, which are agents of growth and economic development.

Which tools do you use to do investigative work?

Everything is backed up with documentation and we do that by figuring out the structure of organized crime, how gangs steal money and then follow the money laboriously by tracing company ownerships, money flows, asset flows and real estate transactions. It’s more like forensic accounting than what you would expect from journalism. It involves a lot of complex paperwork. Money has to be documented and we piece it together very carefully. Sometimes it takes up to a year to do it.

Is this information freely available?

It depends on the laws of the country; most of it is either free or cheap. In London you can find out who owns a company and so on from Company House for a pound. However, if you go to the British Virgin Isles it can cost hundreds of dollars. Ninety percent of the information we get is from public records, which the public could exploit if they had the time and expertise to get it. We’re very interested in finding ways to crowdsource and get the public involved and we’re working on tools to do just that.

And what are those tools?

We’re trying to build a system whereby the public can contribute to networks of public crime figures. If we put out some information which is interesting to them or local to their area, they may be able to go to their local authorities and find more information. The problem for organized crime figures is that money flows are largely public, and once the money has been laundered it’s normally quite transparent if you can figure out the connection between the clean and dirty money.

Can you tell me how the Investigative Dashboard (ID) and Visual Investigative Scenarios (VIS) work and the technology behind them?

These are tools we built for ourselves initially because we wanted our members to use them. Google Ideas supported us with the ID and it’s essentially a three-part tool. We give links to public databases around the world, so you can look through them yourself. If you can’t find the information you need there then we have all the data we’ve pulled together over the years and you can use that. If you still don’t have what you need you can come to our professional researchers and we will do the search.

VIS is a tool that allows you to visualize businesses and people and therefore helps you to understand what’s happening in these crime structures. Our long-term goal is to build tools that allow you to look at the data and better understand your investigation. 

How should a citizen go about investigating a story?

The more information you collect and put together, the more likely you’ll be able to sell it to a professional investigator. The first thing is figuring out the system. Start by making some guesses as to what they’re trying to do and look for the information to prove or disprove that hypothesis. For example, if you think an organized crime figure has bribed city officials to turn over a city green so they can build a new apartment complex, you can look at who owns the company, who’s behind in and use the investigative dashboard to get the records yourself. Look to see whether the officials have bought new property or a nicer car and if you find something worthwhile bring it to a journalist or government entity that can do something about it.

I know someone who was convinced the airport in their local community was a corrupt place where bad people were operating from and so tracked down some of the people running the airport, found out they had a criminal history and then found out who owned all the planes coming through and that they were coming from Florida and Texas,  big drug smuggling states. So they took the information to the FBI, who started an investigation. The public often thinks they can’t prove something, but they can.