The response of Drew Sullivan, OCCRP publisher.
[Editor’s note: we have only included here Drew Sullivan's replies to our questions concerning the events reported in this article about the NDR and its journalists, and their investigation into the OCCRP.]
Question: About the fact that in October 2023, M. Sullivan requested that OCCRP journalists do not communicate with NDR reporters researching OCCRP.
Reply: 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 encouraged them to do what he thought was best but our partner centers are not beholden to anyone. They act on their own and while they may take what we say into consideration, they will make up their own minds.
Question: About the fact that in October 2023, M. Sullivan requested that OCCRP journalists tell M. Sullivan if they talked to NDR reporters, and if yes, what they said to NDR reporters.
Reply: 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. […] Everyone has a right to provide us information or not but it’s not unethical to ask them to do so.
Question: About the fact in October 2023, M. Sullivan wrote in emails to OCCRP reporters that he applied pressure on the editors of NDR about NDR’s story about OCCRP.
Reply: 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.
Question: About the fact in October 2023, M. Sullivan wrote in emails to OCCRP reporters that the NDR reporters could be “Russian assets”.
Reply: If you obtain private emails from within an organization, you should not complain about the contents. We have no obligation to prove anything to you from a private email. As professional journalists, we stand by what we publish. As you know, reporters pursue leads and obtain evidence that they don’t publish, for various reasons. We have not published the statements that you attribute to us and therefore do not see an imperative to justify these statements. We trust that you have sought to investigate the facts yourselves.
The OCCRP allegations against journalist Stefan Candea
OCCRP publisher Drew Sullivan, together with the board of directors of the OCCRP, have made defamatory comments against Romanian freelance journalist Stefan Candea, co-writer of this article. “Stefan Candea, who appears to have played a critical role in the development of your article, has had personal conflicts with OCCRP and business relationships with one of the OCCRP founders. The journalists among us would have precluded the participation of someone with such obvious conflict,” wrote the board, of which Drew Sullivan is a member.
Stefan Cande is a pioneer in international collaborations producing investigative reporting. In 2001, he co-founded the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism (RCIJ), a non-profit journalistic NGO. With the RCIJ, he contributed to the development of transnational investigative reporting, bringing together several East European media.
Stefan Candea became a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in 2006, and took part in the ICIJ’s first major international investigation, Secrecy for Sale, published in 2013. In 2015 he co-founded the media network European Investigative Collaborations (EIC), of which Mediapart is a member. Stefan Candea is today both a freelance journalist and a part-time coordinator for the EIC.
Stefan Candea has never had “business relationships” with Paul Radu, a Romanian journalist who co-founded the OCCRP. During the 2000s, Candea and Radu both worked with the RCIJ, which took part in the creation of the OCCRP as of 2007.
In 2011, Stefan Candea, writing in the name of the RCIJ, sent an email to other members of the OCCRP in which he explained why the RCIJ had decided to leave the OCCRP. He explained that this decision was taken because the RCIJ considered that the US-registered structures (Journalism Development Group and subsequently the Journalism Development Network) used by Drew Sullivan for the management of the OCCRP were not sufficiently transparent regarding the origins of funds they received nor the use that was made of them. He also argued that the OCCRP did not give its media members adequate power over the governance of the organisation.
Following that, Paul Radu, who disagreed with Stefan Candea’s view, decided to leave the RCIJ for the OCCRP.
The content of the email sent by Stefan Candea in the name of the RCIJ was factual and measured, and was only concerned with the organisation of the OCCRP. The least that can be said is that the investigation we publish here confirms the initial elements he was able to gather at the time.
Stefan Candea never criticised the quality of the OCCRP’s journalism. Indeed, in his 2011 email he wrote that the RCIJ had “great respect for the stories OCCRP produced and for the network of journalists”, that it “doesn't intend to create conflicting sides” and that it would continue to authorise its journalists to “participate in any OCCRP project on an individual basis”.
Stefan Candea raised the episode in 2011 in his PhD thesis, entitled Cross-border Investigative Journalism: a critical perspective completed at the University of Westminster in London in 2020. He also returned to the subject in a 2021 article commissioned by the Berliner Gazette on the occasion of a conference.
Stefan Candea is not at the origin of the investigation published here, which was in fact initiated by John Goetz, an award-winning investigative journalist with German broadcaster NDR, and who was later joined in the project by his colleague Armin Ghassim. Because of his PhD thesis and his wide knowledge of international networks of investigative journalism, Stefan Candea was employed by NDR to work on the investigation on a freelance basis.
At the end of August 2024, NDR invited Mediapart, Drop Site News (US), Il Fatto Quotidiano (Italy) and Reporters United (Greece) to join the project. After NDR decided to censor the broadcasting of its investigation, Stefan Candea continued to help Mediapart and its three other media partners to continue with and finalise the project.
The articles that we publish today are the result of the collective work of eight journalists from five different media, who have together gathered and verified the information they contain in all independence, and with the strictest respect of journalistic ethics.
We consider that the OCCRP attacks against Stefan Candea are an attempt to divert attention from the facts reported here by trying to discredit some of the journalists who discovered them.
Drew Sullivan informed us that he had decided, even before the publication of our reports, to publish an article denouncing our working methods. In preparation of this counter-article, he sent us 13 questions on November 8th 2024. They contain defamatory and unsubstantiated allegations, notably against Stefan Candea, and no factual elements.
We have until now refused to answer these, on the one hand because it is impossible to evaluate the quality of an article before having read it, and on the other because Drew Sullivan refused to supply us with the factual elements he claims to have gathered and which supposedly support the accusations he levels against us. “Since you are writing a story, it is up to you to prove allegations, not us. You will get access during the discovery process in court,” he wrote on November 19th, in a reply to our decision.