WE PARTNER ON IN-DEPTH REPORTING AT SOURCE
WE PARTNER ON IN-DEPTH REPORTING AT SOURCE
Our primary purpose is the joint reporting and publication of investigative journalism with a focus on European topics to understand how power structures affect European communities.
The basis for cooperation among EIC member organizations is the regular sharing of information and consultations on possible story ideas. We have regular meetings and work on several fronts: tackling European stories; finding, compiling, processing or analyzing big data-sets; developing under Free Software license our own Network collaborative tools, platforms und information design.
We take a long-term approach and therefore involve in our collaborative projects the generation #25 to work together with senior reporters and editors.
This is a non-exclusive Network, meaning that members can be part of other Networks, but only one medium or media outlet from each European country can be an EIC member, ensuring national exclusivity.
Stefan Candea is coordinating the Network communication, workflow and tools development. Each investigative collaboration will have him working closely with the story initiator to decide on the work plan, tools and publication schedule.
The Board of EIC works together with the coordinator, Stefan Candea, to advise and decide on EIC partnerships, membership, future developments and the agenda of EIC General Assembly. The Board members are journalists working with the EIC member newsrooms. Current Board is made of Pierre-Yves Warnotte (Le Soir), Nicola Naber (Der Spiegel), Yann Pilippin (Medipart), Zeynep Sentek (The Black Sea), Anne Mette Svane (Politiken) and Clemens Höges (Der Spiegel) who is also the Chair of the Board.
Here are our governing principles:
We believe networks are here to stay. Due to their structure and methodology, collaborative networks are one of the few mechanisms able to keep up with the globalized power structures (ie. governments, corporations), thus becoming the only way forward for investigative journalism.
EIC is putting together different mind-sets, organization types and skills. This is insuring a flow of new challenges, ideas and approaches. Our aim is to build a European network to focus on independent, high-quality cross-border and European investigative journalism projects.
Our focus areas: (un)organized crime, environment, sport, public spending, corporate corruption, lobby, public health, religious groups, state aid, military & secret services, banks & finance, labor markets, migration.
Discussions related to establishing this European Network started in 2015 and involved Jörg Schmitt, Jürgen Dahlkamp, Alfred Weinzierl and Klaus Brinkbäumer from Spiegel and Stefan Candea from the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism. Alain Lallemand from Le Soir joined the group, and later John Hansen from Politiken, Milorad Ivanovic from Newsweek Serbia, Florian Klenk from Falter, Paula Guisado from El Mundo, Vlad Odobescu from The Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism, Michael Bird from The Black Sea, Fabrice Arfi from Mediapart and Vittorio Malagutti from L'Espresso.
EIC partners are pulling together resources to do investigative research but also to develop tools and information design. We are building tools under a Free Software Licence and the lead developer is DER SPIEGEL IT department, but all EIC member organizations commit themselves to contribute.
During the coming months EIC will decide on future partnerships related to stories or tools development.
The story of the most heavily industrialised area of Turkey. For six months, The Black Sea and the European Investigative Collaborations network have investigated the public health crisis in Kocaeli, the most heavily industrialised region in Turkey. We have revealed of a pattern of chemical dumping and polluting that has led to a widespread health crisis in the region. One small town, Dilovası, home to around 45,000 residents, bears the most serious consequences of three decades of unbridled industrial development, with widespread health problems among the locals, filthy air, soil, and waters, caused by uncontrolled pollution. We found that the Kocaeli region was home to more than 2000 companies, with around 15 percent of these having some foreign ownership, and most from the EU. German companies are at the top of the list. The Turkish state knows the extent of the locals' misery. Yet it not only ignores the scientific evidence, it actively encourages new polluting businesses to the area. With key health data withheld by the Turkish government, we spoke instead with dozens of locals; adults and children with serious, chronic health problems, and with doctors and other professionals who are too scared to speak about an ongoing public health disaster. Independent studies have shown that even mother’s breast-milk and newborn babies are affected by unhealthy levels of contaminants.
» moreA collective look behind intransparent company records. In an unprecedented project, EIC network opened up its investigative work to a journalism school to jointly review and research material provided by the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS). Journalists, students and technologists worked together on a dataset containing almost one million documents from the Bahamas company registry. DDoS acted as an intermediary for the source that leaked the material to the collective. Lorax Horne and Emma Best of DDoS entrusted EIC colleagues and German [Henri-Nannen-Journalistenschule]( https://journalistenschule.de/) with this project. The stories published by EIC partners, which will be listed below, reveal that through all political efforts to curb harmful tax practices and the global fight against offshore tax havens, a closer look into intransparent company registries like the Bahamas still show that wealthy individuals continue hiding their assets. It also shows how the registration methods have changed over the years and that corporate tax avoidance still poses a huge challenge for regulators. All data used for this research is made available for further investigation by DDoS on [their website](https://ddosecrets.com/data/north_america/). Some portion of the documents were rendered to text via optical character recognition (OCR), with mixed results. The incomplete searchable data is loaded in DDoS' native [search platform Hunter ](https://hunter.ddosecrets.com/datasets/84) for further investigations or download. A crowdsource effort to complete the text capture is happening via [the new tool Xray](https://xray.ddosecrets.com/).
» moreCompany operated on Jersey offering forgery and money laundering services for decades with impunity. A huge new leak of tax haven documents has revealed an especially dirty part of the tax haven world, including forgery of documents, dummy accounts and the use of false client names. The leak consists of hundreds of thousands of pages of records of a Jersey offshore company called La Hougue (later Pantrust in Panama) that offered techniques for money laundering to its hand-picked clients. The Jersey Offshore leak is the latest in a succession of major leaks that have exposed why tax havens like Jersey need to be regulated and closed down. Jersey Offshore’s special contribution is that the secret company records reveal detailed techniques used to hide money, dodge tax and evade government regulators. It also reveals thousands of secret money transfers, allowing the team of journalists to follow the money. Jersey Offshore is unique because the sources of the leak are prepared to be named and front up publicly. They had been cheated by La Hougue, set out to fight it legally and along the way gained access to the company’s extremely secret records. Jersey Offshore is also about the island of Jersey, which tolerated La Hougue for decades with no effective oversight. When the sources handed over the full La Hougue records to the Jersey authorities, expecting action on the criminality, the authorities declined to take action and then refused to return the evidence. Fortunately the sources had already scanned the documents they hand over and a multi-country team of investigative journalists has been studying what they reveal. Stories published by EIC and partners will be listed below. We are aware that more stories could be buried in the leaked archive, so we are also ready to share the collection of leaked source documents to media and organizations doing investigative research in the public interest. [Get in touch!](https://eic.network/#contact)
» moreEurope is flooded with massive amounts of cocaine, at record high purity. Large captures and high purity of cocaine on the streets of Europe show that traditional production and supply chains of this drug have been disrupted. A team of journalists, who are part of the network European Investigative Collaborations, has been investigated this phenomenon for the last several months
» moreFootball Leaks investigative project continues. This is a cross-border investigation into how the secret deals of club officials, leading associations, agents, investors and players have corrupted the most popular sport in the world. Continues revelations are based on research into more then 70 million documents totalling 3.4 terabytes of data. The data extends to the year 2018. Recent work was undertaken by the network European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) and its partners, which has brought together 15 media and almost 80 journalists from 13 countries, publishing in 11 languages across Europe. Follow #FootballLeaks @EICnetwork to keep up with the stories over the next days and check out [here](https://eic.network/projects/football-leaks) our past reporting during the first Football Leaks investigation. We will also upload all of our stories below, published in different languages by different media organizations.
» moreHow the EU pays Turkey to keep out refugees. An investigation by Danwatch, Politiken, and The Black Sea with the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) network looks into the programmes paid for by the EU to Turkey to keep refugees out of Europe. Contracts show that the EU bought 83 million Euro worth of military vehicles, surveillance equipment and patrol boats for the Turkish military to seal and police its borders with Europe and Syria, which experts argue might contravene international humanitarian law. In-depth research into the six billion Euro EU-Turkey refugee 'Facility', signed in 2016 and financed by European tax payer money, reveals that it suffers from lack of transparency, slow implementation, harassment by Turkey of NGOs partners, and a rush to play politics.
» moreThis investigation analyzes the criminal policy instituted by the first prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Luis Moreno Ocampo. Court Secrets is a project by EIC.network which will publish a series of articles based on over 40,000 documents, financial statements, diplomatic cables and correspondence, cross-checked with public sources.
» moreThe Malta Files show how the Mediterranean state works as a pirate base for tax avoidance inside the EU. Although profiting from the advantages of EU membership, Malta also welcomes large companies and wealthy private clients who try to dodge taxes in their home countries. Over the last three months, EIC.network has dug into hundreds of thousands of documents that show how Malta operates a tax system where companies pay the lowest tax on profits in the EU. This damages the budgets of other EU-countries and reveals a weakness in the European Union, which allows member states sovereign rights over their taxation.
» moreThe largest leak in the history of sports reveals murky financial transactions in the world of European professional football and exposes the tax tricks employed by some of the Continent's biggest stars. The data includes 18.6 million documents, including original contracts with secret subsidiary agreements, emails, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and photos. The data set extends into the year 2016. EIC partners will publish their findings in the coming weeks, allowing for an unprecedented look into the gloomy depths of the modern football industry.
» moreEast Europe’s shadow gun market is fuelling terrorism in the west, as criminal gangs use legal loopholes and open borders to traffic weapons. An international team of journalists who are part of the newly established network European Investigative Collaborations has spent three months detailing how Brussels’ failure to impose comprehensive directives has facilitated the sale of deadly weapons.
» moreIn 2016, European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) started publishing in-depth reportage focused on events critical to Europe. The network currently includes more than 100 journalists, information-designers and technologists working together on specific large-scale projects. Due to our many meetings and conversations, small groups of journalists in our network discuss ideas for cross-border stories and publish articles that enlist the talents of the reporters from our pool of professionals. Links to such stories are listed below.
» moreIf you want to get in touch please communicate with Stefan Candea at [email protected] (pgp: 0x8234F8D4A624D9F4).