Mediapart, together with three other media organisations, can today reveal the close ties that exist between the US government and the largest international network of investigative journalism, the NGO OCCRP (Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project).
The global OCCRP network brings together 70 media outlets and has taken part in some of the most far-reaching cooperative international investigations into corruption and tax evasion, including Panama Papers and Cyprus Confidential.
But Mediapart and its partners can also reveal how this investigation into the OCCRP was censored by German public broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), even though the NDR had initiated the project and led it alone over 18 months, before inviting Mediapart and three other media to join in the project.
The censorship is all the more remarkable in that the NDR, a Hamburg-based regional public radio and television broadcaster covering northern Germany, has earned a reputation for both the quality of its journalism and its independence.
According to documents obtained by Mediapart, the decision to shelve the investigation was taken after US journalist Drew Sullivan, the co-founder and head of the OCCRP, placed pressure on the NDR management and made false accusations against the broadcaster’s journalists involved in the project.
The NDR is one of numerous media which collaborate with the OCCRP, including on the projects Suisse Secrets and Russian Assets Tracker.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
In a joint reply by email to questions submitted by Mediapart, Andreas Cichowicz and Adrian Feuerbacher, joint editors in chief of NDR’s TV operations, and Juliane von Schwerin, deputy head of programming, wrote: “We strongly reject your judgement, conclusion and narrative”.
In their response, which was both convoluted and contradictory, they indicated that the findings of their journalists had led them to suspend all further collaboration with the OCCRP, but that those same findings were of little interest for their TV viewers. However, they also said that they still wanted to broadcast a report about the OCCRP, but only after the four media outlets, including Mediapart, which they had invited to join in the investigation, had published their own reports on the matter.
The NDR investigation into the OCCRP began in January 2023. It was first led by two reporters, one of whom was John Goetz, an experienced investigative journalist who has won several awards for his work, including an Emmy Award and the European Press Prize.
In February 2023, the OCCRP was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Subsequently, several senior staff members of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) agreed to take part in filmed interviews with NDR in August 2023.
Proud to have financed a journalistic NGO which had become a potential Nobel prize winner, the interviewees spoke very frankly, apparently without realising how revealing their comments were. Among these was that the US government had the right to veto appointments to the OCCRP’s “key personnel”, and that the financing that allowed for the NGO’s creation was secretly paid out by the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) of the US Department of State (see more here).
On September 6th 2023, OCCRP co-founder and publisher Drew Sullivan was interviewed on camera by NDR reporters John Goetz and Armin Ghassim. While he said that the US authorities had no influence over his work, he confirmed the revelations made by the USAID senior staff, and also contradicted himself on the extent of Washington’s financial support for the OCCRP.
After watching a first edit of NDR’s report on the revelations, the broadcaster’s top editorial management provisionally suspended any further partnership with the OCCRP. “Our institutional cooperation with OCCRP has been put on ice since the first accusations became known in September 2023, and this is still the case. We have stopped participation to all projects led by OCCRP until further notice,” wrote Von Schwerin, Feuerbacher, and Cichowicz in their reply to Mediapart.
On October 4th and 5th 2023, Sullivan sent three emails to OCCRP journalists, in which he advised them to “not talk” to NDR’s Goetz and Ghassim. “It’s like talking to RT - your words may be twisted,” warned Sullivan, comparing the German broadcaster with the Kremlin’s propaganda TV channel RT (formerly Russia Today).
“None of this is unethical. We suggested your reporters talk to our journalists. We also warned them you have been fabricating and misrepresenting your motives and focus,” Sullivan told us.
In the same emails to OCCRP’s reporters, Sullivan also claimed inaccurately, without the least proof, that Goetz had been described as a “Russian asset” by the German secret services. “This reporter has a sketchy history on these issues and you can never be sure who is a Russian asset,” wrote Sullivan about Goetz.
In an email titled “Propaganda against our network” (see below), Sullivan claimed, again without proof, that the NDR journalists were “digging for dirt to support an inaccurate narrative”, in which they supposedly sought to demonstrate that WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange (who was at the time in a British prison fighting extradition to the US) was more worthy of the Nobel prize than the OCCRP.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
We asked Drew Sullivan if he had proof of these allegations, and if he was aware of the reputational damage that they can cause when being sent to all OCCRP reporters. “If you obtain private emails from within an organization, you should not complain about the contents,” Sullivan answered. “We have no obligation to prove anything to you from a private email. As professional journalists, we stand by what we publish.”
Sullivan also asked journalists who spoke to colleagues from NDR to identify themselves and to detail the subjects of those conversations, which is arguably a violation of a principle of journalistic ethics and press freedom, namely the protection of the secrecy of sources.
“We have the right to protect ourselves by reviewing how the reporting is being done and how people’s information is being used or misused,” Sullivan answered. “Everyone has a right to provide us information or not but it’s not unethical to ask them to do so.”
Sullivan also claimed on several occasions to have applied pressure on the NDR management. “We have sent our comments to NDR management and encouraged them to hold him [John Goetz] to our standard of fact checking and accuracy. I've also encouraged them to weigh the damage this could do you,” he wrote in an email sent to OCCRP journalists.
Investigations into Washington's enemies
On October 23 2023, Sullivan sent an email to NDR’s Goetz and Ghassim in which he gave added detail to what he had said the previous month in their recorded interview with him. He also accused Goetz of “malice toward OCCRP” and raised the threat of legal action.
Sullivan confirmed to us that he raised his concerns to NDR editorial management. “It would be unethical to do anything else. We recommended fact checking and high standards. What statement above is not good advice to a fellow editor? We have no idea why NDR made the decision they did.”
The broadcasting of the report by Goetz and Ghassim was provisionally suspended, but NDR’s Von Schwerin, Feuerbacher, and Cichowicz insist that they did not, at any moment “bow to any possible pressure”.
The NDR journalists continued with their investigation for a year, assisted by Stefan Candea, a Romanian freelance journalist and coordinator for the media network European Investigative Collaborations (EIC), of which Mediapart is a contributing member (see the "Black box" notes at the bottom of this page).
On August 27th 2024 the journalists sent written questions to Sullivan and to members of the board of directors of the OCCRP. They sent back their replies on September 11th, along with a threat of taking legal action.
Just before, NDR had invited four media outlets to join in the investigation. These were Mediapart, Drop Site News (in the US), Il Fatto Quotidiano (in Italy) and Reporters United (in Greece). In the space of a month, we discovered key new information – including the exact sums involved in the US funding of the OCCRP, and also the existence of donations that were conditional to being used for investigations into certain countries regarded as enemies of the United States, such as Russia and Venezuela.
We decided to send further questions to the OCCRP, as a basic ethical and legal obligation, before publishing the results of our investigations.
On October 17th, the editor overseeing the investigation at NDR wrote to us that the questions are “impressive” but also announced that “NDR will not participate in sending these questions”. No explanation was given for this, and we were told to write to the broadcaster’s press office if we wanted a “statement” on the matter.
The situation had become absurd. Mediapart and the other three outlets which had been invited to join in the investigation were not asking for a public statement, but rather to discuss with NDR, in the framework of our partnership, to understand where the problem lay and to try and resolve it together.
On October 23rd, the editors in chief of Mediapart, Drop Site News and Reporters United co-signed a letter (see below) to NDR’s co-editor in chief Andreas Cichowicz and deputy head of programming Juliane von Schwerin. They replied on November 1st in an email that was also signed by the second co-editor in chief Adrian Feuerbacher,. They announced that they had “decided against continuing the project for the time being” following what they described as “intensive and controversial internal discussion”.
These three top editorial managers said that the editors of NDR’s news and current affairs programmes, whose aim was to attract “a broad audience”, had all declined to broadcast the investigation “due to a lack of relevance” for their viewers. They also underlined that the subject of the investigation posed “editorial and legal issues” and that they “consider it premature that individual NDR employees have initiated cooperation with your companies”.
It would appear that the NDR senior managers sought to blame their journalists for having initiated a partnership with Mediapart and other media outlets and for sharing the results of their own investigation. However, an email that was addressed to us on October 11th demonstrates that Juliane von Schwerin personally validated the “joint research” with us.
Mediapart and the three other media outlets subsequently informed the three NDR editorial managers of our intention to publish an article on the broadcaster’s shelving of its report on the OCCRP, and therefore requested their replies to several formal questions.
They responded by insisting they “strongly reject” any form of censorship, while giving contradictory answers. They detailed that the NDR’s magazine programme dedicated to reporting media news, “ZAPP”, had concluded the investigation into the OCCRP “was not considered suitable for the format and audience” but that the “editorial team” of ZAPP “plans to report on the content and background from a media perspective when the research is published, […] in the linear program and on social media”.
In sum, NDR recognised that the revelations about the OCCRP deserve to be broadcast, but only after they are published by the four media partners who contributed to the investigation.
Von Schwerin, Feuerbacher, and Cichowicz also said they had no problems with the contents nor the thoroughness of the investigation, adding that what they previously described as “editorial and legal issues” was in fact a reference to “licensing and liability issues” concerning the sharing of information between NDR and Mediapart and the three other media outlets. However, the broadcaster had never raised such questions with us. “We have absolutely no intention of accusing our colleagues” over the matter, they added.
On the subject of the partnership between NDR and the OCCRP, which was suspended in September 2023, Von Schwerin, Feuerbacher, and Cichowicz announced: “Once further possible accusations have been confirmed and proven, we‘ll discuss the results and decide how to proceed.” But they are already in possession of all the information required to reach such a decision.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.