It’s been a tumultuous year as the world faces challenges of
ever-increasing complexity and interdependence. From misinformation and
political polarization to cross-border catastrophes to heightening
economic stratification, these issues are all the more difficult and
multidimensional to understand and investigate.
2022 has also been a year like no other for ICIJ. Our newsroom departed
from our usual model of unveiling one mega-investigation per year and
instead published
multiple exposés and regional stories on a wider variety of topics than
ever before.
Some of these projects were based on new leaks, others responded to
unfolding global news events, and many dug deeper on patterns and topics
that emerged from ICIJ’s years of reporting on the world of tax havens.
All of them aimed to show our readers how the world really works by
examining under-the-radar phenomena like financial crime and secrecy,
corporate corruption and other systemic drivers of global inequality and
wrongdoing.
Here’s a recap of our
biggest stories of the year, and the impact they had all around the world.
We worked with journalists from more than 60 different countries in 2022
to bring them to life. Our radical approach to collaboration has
continued to elevate our work and made it possible for reporters to
investigate and publish hard-hitting stories in regions most hostile to
press freedom.
This model of working together to bring local expertise to stories of
global importance allowed us to expose Russian oligarchs’ secret money
trails, uncover cross-border criminal networks, quantify the global scale
of corporate recidivism, track looted cultural treasures around the
world, and more.
RISKY BUSINESS
An anti-corruption crusader is alleged to
have extorted the same wealthy Venezuelan officials that he helped the
U.S. investigate – highlighting the difficulties and
complexities of relying on informants and consultants in international
corruption cases.
GLOBAL DATA
DIVE
One of the main challenges of the Shadow Diplomats investigation was that
no one has a reliable count of the number of honorary consuls to serve
around the world – let alone the number who have been mired in
controversy. ICIJ and
media partners spent months on a massive cross-border data effort to
quantify the scale of the problem of rogue diplomats.
ERICSSON ON
WATCH
The telecom giant will face an extra
year of monitoring after twice breaching its billion-dollar corruption
settlement with the U.S. Justice Department. The
announcement came on the heels of a new ICIJ investigation showing how
often corporations repeatedly violate the terms of corporate leniency
deals.
GLOBAL MEDIA
AWARD
ICIJ’s recent investigation about how many foreign
workers for defense contractors on U.S. military bases in the Persian
Gulf are trapped by abusive employment practices banned by
the U.S. government is the winner of the International Labour
Organization’s 2022 Global Media Competition on Labour Migration.
Thank you for sticking with us this year! We’ll be taking a two-week
break from the newsletter and can’t wait to bring you more hard-hitting
investigations that rock the world in 2023!
Asraa Mustufa
ICIJ's digital editor
P.S. If you've enjoyed our coverage this week, remember to
tell your friends and family and share our work on social media.
Send them an email
now!
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