Ilya Lozovsky and Miranda Patrucic, two editors at OCCRP, came to Prague with the intention of staying for one night to work on a barely-begun investigation with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty into a Kyrgyz money laundering scheme. Then they stayed for over two weeks. After the project’s main source was killed, they realized they needed...
It started with just a name on a company registration form: Antonino Vadala. Because that name belonged to a man in business with Maria Troskova – a model turned businesswoman who became an assistant to Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico – reporters wanted to know more. That curiosity may have killed Slovak journalist Jan Kuciak along with...
In 2008, an attempt to decommission part of Albania’s aging, deadly stockpile of Cold War-era munitions went horribly wrong. At about noon on March 15, a series of explosions at a facility in the village of Gërdec sent fireballs into the sky, artillery shells into homes, and shockwaves slamming into the nearby capital, Tirana. The...
Czech President Miloš Zeman likes to joke about shooting journalists. The veteran politician, who is running for reelection this week, recently earned international opprobrium when, sporting a faux assault rifle, he figuratively took aimat the press. As it turns out, if Zeman ever wants to make good on his threats, his chief financial backer may have...
Czech arms tycoon Jaroslav Strnad did not limit his Balkan shopping spree to stockpiled Chinese munitions. The businessman also bought at least two bankrupt, formerly state-owned factories in the former Yugoslavia, both of which are linked to the arms industry. He made the first of those purchases, the Suvenir ammunition factory in the Macedonian village...
The Azerbaijani Laundromat is a complex money-laundering operation and slush fund that handled $2.9 billion over a two-year period through four shell companies registered in the UK. The scheme was uncovered through a joint investigation by Berlingske (Denmark), OCCRP, The Guardian (UK), Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), Le Monde (France), Tages-Anzeiger and Tribune de Genève (Switzerland), De Tijd (Belgium), Novaya Gazeta (Russia), Dossier (Austria), Atlatszo.hu(Hungary), Delo (Slovenia), RISE Project (Romania), Bivol (Bulgaria), Aripaev (Estonia), Czech Center for Investigative Journalism (Czech Republic), and Barron’s (US). This project is part...