Bastian Obermayer of the Munich based paper Süddeutsche Zeitung and Gerard Ryle, Director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, spoke with Jenna Miller to discuss their work on the award-winning “Panama Papers.” Their organizations, along with more than 100 other media partners, took home the Gold Award at the 2016 Barlett and Steele Awards for Investigative Journalism. They discuss how the investigation began and what it took for so many journalists across the globe to collaborate on such a large investigation.
Transcript
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Jenna Miller: How to Cover Money: Inside the 2016 Barlett and Steele Gold award-winning investigation, “The Panama Papers.”
Bastian Obermayer: It was hard, of course. If you know one journalist, you probably have somebody with a quite big ego, and we had 400 of them in our collaboration. So we had arguments, we had fights inside our groups. For a year, we had to find compromises and compromises.
Miller: Hello and welcome to the Reynolds Center How to Cover Money podcast. We’re coming to you from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism based at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. I’m Jenna Miller, today’s host of the How to Cover Money podcast. Today we talk with reporter Bastian Obermayer of the Munich based paper, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Gerard Ryle, Director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists about the 2016 Barlett and Steele Gold Award project “The Panama Papers.” The Panama Papers global investigation was the largest in history. It began with the League of millions of documents from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, which created offshore companies to hide financial information. Journalists dug through all of these documents to find evidence of wrongdoing by some of the most powerful people in the world. The huge success was due in part to the unprecedented cooperation by over 100 media partners who coordinated to keep the story a secret until publication. I sat down with Bastian Obermayer and Gerard Ryle to go behind the scenes of this historic investigation. Obermeyer was the first person to communicate with the initial whistleblower and get a look at the documents. He starts us off by describing his first reactions.
Obermayer: The first messages were quite short and clear, and I had a good feeling, but it’s been a bad day, because my whole family was sick and my kids were throwing up, and I had to change the sheets, and I had to go back and forth with the source and to show that I’m really willing, and I’m the one that he or she really wants to give the material. So it’s been an exhaustive day. And in the end, we got the first material, and I was really excited, because where it was coming from. It was coming from Mossack Fonseca, a law firm from Panama that we only knew the black hole as a black door. You know, whenever we tried to get information from there, was no chance for us, and now we had somebody who clearly had access to the the inners of Mossack Fonseca, and that made me really happy. And when we found only a few days later, the best body of Vladimir Putin and the then acting prime minister of Iceland. I was really happy, and decided to call Gerald.
Gerald Ryle: Yeah. I got a call from Bastian a few weeks after he got the documents, and he was very excited from day one. He was convinced it was a very big story. I wasn’t, simply because we had done a number of offshore secrecy jurisdiction stories already at ICIJ, and which is how we got to know each other. For me, every story that we do has got to be better than the last story. And I thought, because of it, I’ll try and convince all of these media partners to get interested in the story. This story had to be really good, and I needed to be convinced. Now he laughs about that, but I also think that that was my job, and I think it’s important to make,.. for reporters to really think about, “Well, what is the story here? How are we going to make this interesting for people?” So it was one of caution, but I did get a little bit excited when I went to Munich. We spent a few days looking through the material. And I thought, “Yeah, this could be good.”
Obermayer: But we didn’t know also, there was one essential part of the story that it, you know, our excitement kept also growing because we got more and better names all the way while we’re working. And that was another thing that kept us going hard.
Ryle: Yeah, it wasn’t like you were getting a bunch of documents of a source who was saying, here are a bunch of documents on 10 politicians or 10 important people. It was here, a bunch of documents, and then you had to go and find whatever was interesting there. And we all started doing what every journalist does, we typed in our favorite names. They weren’t there, we were disappointed. And then you gradually realized that you had to listen to the documents. You had to let the story find you, rather than you find the story.
Miller: Ultimately, Obermayer received 11.5 million documents. Ryle spoke about how they dealt with such a vast web of information.
Ryle: Well, we basically, at ICIJ, so we have data engineers, so half of our team, we’ve got a small team of 12 people, six of them were data engineers. So they worked out a way of, we basically used open source software that had been originally designed for librarians, and we used this open source software basically to index over the documents and make them available on the cloud. And then we allowed the reporters to go from their computers and do document search, a little like Google. And then the second way we managed it was we built a virtual news room for the reporters to go into so they could share tips, talk to each other, ask for help from each other. So if a story went from Germany to Brazil to Greece. We had reporters in each country who could then follow the trail and find documents. It’s very important, when you get documents like this, to put context around them. It’s not like someone’s giving you the document and you have the story. That’s it’s the beginning of the process, not the end of the process. So, for instance, when we found the, as Bastion, found right away, the prime minister of Iceland, that by itself, wasn’t a story. But it was working in Iceland with a reporter there who, first of all realized that they he hadn’t declared that company that made it interesting. But then, by combing through public records of the Icelandic banks, he found a reference to this particular company, and found that it was a creditor of the banks. In fact, it owned stock, or financial interest in the banks. And then it became a great story.
Obermayer: Many stories don’t develop that way. It sounds so easy. If you say there’s a leak and all those documents, you only have to find the good one and hey you’ve got the story, but unfortunately, it’s not at all like this. I think my guess is that for each story we did, we had to bury 15 other stories. And this is really what we did last year. We buried stories one after another. And then in the end, we had decided at to go for, you know, an amount of 50 good stories about people, and then our lawyers came and they threw away another 20 stories. So this was really, really exhausting and hard work, and nothing was easy about it, unfortunately.
Ryle: Yeah, and we had another challenge too, because we operate here in the U.S., we needed to establish public interest in the documents, because clearly these documents have been taken from the company without their permission. So therefore there were effectively stolen documents. And so the way around that was for us to focus on public figures, and that’s why you see so many politicians. I realized that’s what we had to focus on, because that got us over the public interest argument that we would inevitably face, and we did face, once we published. But in order to get that, we were having to, as Bastian said, discard smaller stories that would have been potentially a public interest, but you know, at some point early, you just got to make a decision as to when you got to publish and how many you could publish with the resources you have. And the best stories I think we did, but inevitably, we probably missed some stories.
Miller; I think a huge part of this investigation was cooperation among journalists. Obermayer and Ryle spoke about what the experience was like and what they learned along the way.
Obermayer: Well, all in all, it was a really great experience, but it was hard, of course. If you know one journalist, you probably have somebody with a quite big ego, and we had 400 of them in our collaboration. So we had arguments, we had fights inside our groups. Tor a year we had to find compromises over compromises, and you don’t really like to do that. But it’s really it’s working very, very well. In four days, we had this one story where the loose end was in Ecuador. I mean, like four years ago, the story would have readily stopped from my site in Germany, because how would I get documents in Ecuador? No way. But we had a colleague from Ecuador, and she got exactly the documents we needed, and we had a great story, which led to a raid in the house of the UEFA, the European Soccer Association. So it’s really, it’s the idea of working together is such a great idea that I asked myself, “Why you had to come along to promote it, why nobody else did it before?”
Ryle: You know, I think the other thing that we learned here is how little we don’t know. I mean, when I started off doing this, I thought I knew a lot had been around journalism for a long time. I’d be an investigative reporter for 25 odd years, I guess I thought I knew things. And then I realized, when you work with all these old reporters, how little you actually know. There were so many things I learned. We now remember the great moment when we were all met together in Munich, and there were about 109 of us, and we’re all working on the story. And then one of the Swiss journals got up and said, I found a way to search all passports in the documents. And he had worked out a way, it was a code in every single passport. Once you had that code, you were able to find all those citizens in your own country. I mean, it was like a humbling moment. I was like thinking, “Oh my God. I didn’t know” didn’t even occur to me that you would you know these guys and these girls. They just, there was a German researcher who was brilliant on the on the Putin stuff. I have to say, I all I could do was go, “You are a God.”
Miller: Of course, the most stunning part of this story was the massive global impact.
Ryle: Oh, well, I mean, it’s, yeah, I mean, where do you begin with impact here? I mean, we’ve had you know, a Prime Minister resign. We’ve had a government minister resigned in Armenia, I think the chief lawmaker resigned. We’ve had three arrests this week in Britain. We nearly brought down the Prime Minister of Britain. At the moment, there’s public demonstrations in the streets in Pakistan and Malta. I mean, the impact has been enormous, and I think that we’re going to see the real results over the next year or two. I mean, it takes civil society quite a while from revelation to action, because courts are much slower than journalists, and they have to prove civil wrongdoing or criminal wrongdoing. But in terms of impact, it’s, you know, it has to be, you have to be happy, Bastian.
Obermayer: I mean, it’s, I’ve never dreamt about this. I mean, if you wake up on the morning, on when you just broke the story, and you see mass demonstrations. And several companies, we also had at Iceland, Argentina, and even in London, there was a mass demonstration and and, you know, this is, this becomes something that happened to you, and then you see Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama reacting to the Panama Papers. And you can still remember how you thought this guy is Panama Papers, the real name, or should we name it, like offshore global league or offshore secrets or whatever so, and now everybody is just take “Panama Papers, Panama Papers.” You’re like, “Wow. What happened?” So, no, it’s really unbelievable and I still can’t really trust my eyes when I see what happened. And I think we’ll have to wait for maybe a year to look back and say what has changed in the offshore world, because this is what it’s all about. And if there has been no fundamental change, then I would be very surprised, but we still would have to report that, because we’re not activists. It’s not, you know, it’s not our course that we would be fighting here for. But we are reporting on this stuff. And sure, I don’t like the offshore work, because I think it’s not for the good of humanity that people are able to hide their tracks there and stash the money, but we only to report what we see and the facts, and we are not the law managers.
Miller: Thank you Bastian Obermayer and Gerard Ryle for spending some time with us discussing your award-winning business investigation, and thank you listeners for tuning in to another episode of the How to Cover Money podcast. If you’d like to read “The Panama Papers” investigation, make sure to visit businessjournalism.org. We’ll include links to the award-winning stories in the show notes for this episode. If you’re in need of more business journalism training, the Reynolds Center can help visit Business journalism.org to find articles and self-guided training, download our free eBook: Guide to Business Beat Basics, or sign up for our monthly newsletter. The newsletter will keep you up to date on training opportunities from the Reynolds Center year round. If you enjoy the How to Cover Money podcast, be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher or SoundCloud, and while you’re there, leave us a rating or a review to help make the podcast more visible to other business journalists. Support for the How to Cover Money podcast comes from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. Join us on the next episode of our podcast where we speak with Christopher Weaver of The Wall Street Journal about his work on the 2016 Barlett and Steele Silver award-winning investigation, “Testing Theranos.”
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