Since its inception, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has proven vital to fighting corruption, injustice and inequality on a global scale.
In 2022, ICIJ continued working with partners around the world, casting its net wider than ever before to report on diplomacy, art, telecommunication and transportation, alongside government corruption, money laundering and tax-evasion schemes involving some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people.
The Ericsson List exposed the risk of corruption in the $1.6 trillion telecom industry. The Uber Files revealed the global influence campaign behind the ride-hailing giant’s chaotic global expansion. And other ICIJ investigations shone a light on rogue voluntary diplomats, stolen antiquities, the hidden wealth of Russian oligarchs, and cross-border labor and sex trafficking.
In ICIJ’s 2022 annual report, which you can read in full below, director Gerard Ryle reflected on what he described as a “transformative” year. Here’s what he had to say.
Director’s note
Dear Friends,
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists pledged in 2022 to bring to light stories that would rock the world. We did. Every corner of it — from Venezuela to Malawi to New Zealand and every region in between, producing more stories on a wider variety of topics than ever before.
It was a transformative year for ICIJ. We built on the infrastructure we created over our quarter-century history to break stories revealing inequities in areas we hadn’t reported on before — diplomacy, art, telecommunication and transportation — while continuing to dig deeper into the offshore tax havens we uncovered in The Pandora Papers, Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, FinCEN Files, Offshore Leaks, Lux Leaks, Luanda Leaks and Mauritius Leaks.
We developed a wider and stronger network of partners, opened a new office in Washington, D.C. with space to collaborate, adopted a new logo that better represents our mission, sharpened our focus on technology-led journalism and renewed our commitment to propelling radical collaboration to new frontiers.
Our global network revealed the cost of broken systems, human rights violations, corrupt business practices and massive tax-avoidance schemes that would otherwise have remained hidden. They persisted with independent, truthful examinations of complex systemic failures while contending with transnational disinformation and ideological polarization.
Our global network revealed the cost of broken systems, human rights violations, corrupt business practices and massive tax-avoidance schemes that would otherwise have remained hidden.
— Gerard Ryle, ICIJ’s Director
Along with our partners, we exposed the covert financial activities of Russian oligarchs, mapped criminal networks across borders, quantified the global scale of corporate recidivism and revealed the provenance of ill-gotten antiquities.
Our work in 2022 went deeper than the headlines. We updated the Offshore Leaks Database with information extracted from the nearly 12 million records that comprise the Pandora Papers, the most complex dataset ICIJ has ever analyzed. Our team structured ownership information by company and jurisdiction and made the data public.
Our efforts have enabled regulators and the public to discover connections between individuals and businesses that go beyond what reporters have uncovered. We trained and mentored hundreds of journalists around the world to use reporting platforms including the ones we created. We taught them ICIJ’s model of collaboration so they could uncover systemic abuses, misuses of public funds and other wrongs in their own countries.
This work continues without pause because of the support we receive from our generous institutional partners and individual donors. We are indebted to you. We hope you take pride in the accomplishments highlighted in this report because they are not solely ICIJ’s but yours, too.
The progress you helped us make over the last year leaves us well positioned to rock the world again in 2023. Let’s do it. Together.
With gratitude,
Gerard Ryle
ICIJ’s Director