The largest abroad news agency The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting task (OCCRP), which hunts corruption and deals with alleged investigative journalism – which was active in president Donald Trump's first impeachment in December 2019 (trying to be removed from office due to alleged overexecution of powers), or disclosure of the Pegasus scandal – is not independent...
This organization was created thanks to grants from the American State Department. Moreover, the authorities reserved the influence on the cast of trusted major journalists who were to track corruption in east Europe and Eurasia, excluding America, if it would harm its interests. respective exceptions were made, including to Trump's crew.
According to the findings of the investigation conducted by Drop Site News, the accusations made by the OCCRP on the alleged business activity of the erstwhile fresh York City mayor, fresh York mob slayer and lawyer Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani in Ukraine, became an excuse to launch an impeachment procedure against Donald Trump.
Over 50 leading media are working with OCCRP, including “The fresh York Times” and “The Washington Post”. The investigation shows that U.S. taxpayers financed 52% of OCCRP spending from 2013 to 2012 (at least $47 million since its establishment in 2008). The most funds came from the United States Agency for global improvement (USAID), a subsidiary of the State Department.
The OCCRP board argues: “We realize that reasonable people may consider this a bad idea, especially since this is not the norm for journalism in the United States (although government support for journalism is nothing different in Europe and elsewhere). This was carefully discussed years ago erstwhile the OCCRP was founded."
"The government at the time – which included respective of us, and who stay in it, whose individual reputation as journalists and directors is blameless – decided that it was worth a compromise in exchange for the investigative journalism that the OCCRP could have with this financial support", added.
Investigative journalism is theoretically expected to discover, in the public interest, what others are trying to hide, exploring relationships, for example, between power and business, tracking the abuse of power. It is assumed to be independent. It uses “signalists”, open and secret sources. Sometimes the materials are simply ‘dropped’ by the service. Sometimes investigative journalists actually manage to access applicable data. However, due to the promotion of inclusion and "social justice", this kind of journalism is active in stigmatizing and undermining the image of certain entities, which are not conducive to the implementation of the government's vision, progressive activists, politicians, etc. It simply becomes an ideologically active journalism.
The Dutch-Flamandic association of investigative journalism VVOJ defines investigative journalism as ‘critical and in-depth journalism’ which uses a cautious methodology, relying on primary sources, carefully formulating and checking certain hypotheses, rigorously examining their support in facts.
Some reporters cooperating with the OCCRP, aware of the backing of their activities from US State Department funds had no problem with it. Others expressed concern about the fact that 1 of the world’s major governments has mostly paid for them. For this reason, Lowell Bergman, legendary investigative writer played by Al Pacino in The Insider, resigned from the OCCRP board in 2014.
He resigned his cooperation with OCCRP, e.g. German NDR. The French Media Part service, which collaborated with Drop Site and NDR on a study on OCCRP's engagement in co-operation with the U.S. government, claims that "The fresh York Times" defends itself that it did not know that OCCRP was funded through the State Department.
The OCCRP Group maintains that it initially received backing in 2007 from the United Nations Democracy Fund grant. However, OCCRP was created thanks to a donation of $1 million from the Bureau of global Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, a branch of the State Department.
OCCRP co-founder Drew Sullivan argues that despite the origin of the funds from the US executive authority, there are nevertheless safeguards to defend the organization from external pressures. However, as Drop Site has shown, the US government has set certain conditions, including the right to veto against elder editorial staff. This affects the bias of the agency to theoretically supply reliable material resulting from a journalistic investigation.
In addition to the USAID and the State Department, OCCRP is funded with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund grants and the Open Society Foundation Sorosa. Thus, the OCCRP as the "largest organised network of investigative media in the world" is not credible.
The OCCRP was originally established in 2008 in the capital of Bosnia, Sarajevo, as a media network for investigating organised crime and corruption in the Balkan region. Sixteen years later, she became, according to her founder, the influential reporter Drew Sullivan, “the largest investigative journalism organization on earth”.
It has a budget of EUR 20 million and a crew of 200 scattered across all continents. This network implemented investigative journalism projects through a massive data leak. The most celebrated are: Panama Papers, Pandora Papers, Suisse Secrets, Narco Files, Pegasus Project, Cyprus Confidential, and the Laundromat series, revealing patterns of money laundering of ruling elites in Azerbaijan and Russia.
Currently, OCCRP has its office in Washington, Amsterdam and Sarajevo. It brings together 70 members-medias and 50 media partners, including “The fresh York Times” and “The Washington Post” in the US, but besides British “The Guardian”, German “Der Spiegel” and “Suddeutsche Zeitung”, or French “Le Monde”. For example, the Reporters Foundation cooperates with her.
Drew Sullivan points out that thanks to the OCCRP investigation, the heads of government "in 5 or six" countries were able to overthrow and recover more than $10 billion of lost income. This does not change the fact that the network is sponsored overwhelmingly by the US government and conceals this dependence from its media partners.
Mike Henning, elder advisor at the USAID office for Europe and Eurasia emphasizes: – I am very arrogant to say that I consider OCCRP to be 1 of the best achievements of USAID in the field of democracy and governance. Shannon Maguire, liable for USAID contacts with OCCRP, said in turn: – We are arrogant that [...] the US government is the first public donor of the OCCRP. [...] But we are besides aware of how uncomfortable this relation can sometimes be.
As a result, it is the US that influences the definition of corruption and influences what journalistic investigations are being undertaken and not, trying to remove uncomfortable policy makers. In turn, given the attack on Donald Trump, it can besides be assumed that ideological preferences of influential officials have been incarcerated in US institutions and network donors for years.
In 2021, Samantha Power, USAID's (chief) administrator, described OCCRP as a "partner" of the U.S. government. In a way, it has equipped the agency with investigations which it has undertaken to lead to judicial investigations.
Drew Sullivan is an educated aviation and space engineer. In 1987 he joined the Space Systems department of the giant American Rockwell conglomerate. For six years he worked on an American space shuttle program and launched spy satellites by the shuttle.
In the early 1990s, he began his journalism career, working for the news agency The Associated Press (AP), and then for the diary "The Tennessee" in Nashville. He besides worked as a stand-up comedian. He trained local journalists as part of a program funded by the USAID in Sarajevo.
In 2003, Sullivan turned to Mike Henning, then manager of the USAID office in Sarajevo, asking for the agency to finance the creation of a Bosnian journalistic non-governmental organization to compensate for the deficiency of professionalism and independency of local media in Bosnia. The USAID agreed to the proposal.
The consequence was the beginning in Sarajevo in 2004 of the Center for Investigative Journalism (CIN). His funds were managed by a company called Journalism improvement Group (JDG), which Drew Sullivan controlled. The company was registered in American Delaware County, a taxation haven, its address is simply a mailbox number in fresh York City.
In 2006, Sullivan resigned from CIN. He became friends with Paul Rad, co-founder of the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism, and both men wanted to make a network of journalists who would be able to conduct transnational investigations into corruption and organised crime, combining media, independent reporters and journalistic NGOs from respective Balkan countries. This led to the formation of the OCCRP.
In April 2007, the United Nations Democracy Fund (UNDEF) donated $346,000 to the project, but this sum was insufficient to fund the network's operations.
Thanks to a U.S. Army officer and a state official, David Hodgkinson managed to make the OCCRP. By education, the lawyer was sent by the U.S. Army to 25 countries, including Iraq and Panama. He later continued his service as an army reservist, taking advanced positions in the State Department and the White House, fighting terrorism and dealing with abroad affairs and intelligence.
In the spring of 2007, Hodgkinson, then in the rank of major in the reserve, was manager of safety and prosecution programs at the Office of European Affairs and the Eurasian State Department. Drew Sullivan said the USAID advised him to contact Hodgkinson due to the fact that the agency could not fund the OCCRP. After the meeting, both men were determined to organise backing through funds from the Office of the State Department dealing with the fight against drugs networks worldwide. Its task is to encourage countries to cooperate and fight drug trafficking and organised crime.
However, since the office had no competence in media activities, the case yet went to USAID. This agency formally spent $1.7 million on the agency's activities in May 2008. The invoices were issued to Drew Sullivan JDG.
Mike Henning of the USAID pointed out that backing the agency's investigative journalism activities gives “the anticipation of revealing corrupt schemes, the way money is being laundered” and “the beauty of investigative reporters and truly independent journalists [...] is that people will talk more to a writer than to a government official. [...] So law enforcement is satisfied that another external actors are doing this kind of work.”
The OCCRP has never publically revealed these links and subsequent grants granted to recently created Sullivan entities, e.g. the Journalism improvement Network (JDN), which inactive manages the OCCRP.
In total, OCCRP was to receive at least $47 million from the U.S. government. Plus $1.1 million from the European Union and $14 million from six European countries: Britain (7 million), Sweden (4 million), and the remainder coming from Denmark, Switzerland, Slovakia and France (whose abroad ministry donated $100,000 last year).
Sullivan initially claimed that OCCRP had a ‘widely distributed group of donors’ among which ‘no donor dominates’ and ‘the US government [...] is 1 of the largest funders but not a immense percentage’.
Then, after disclosure, he admitted that Washington "is the largest donor of OCCRP".
Importantly, the biggest donor has stated that OCCRP has no right to analyse US cases for money provided by Washington. Hence, for example, the disclosure of information about the corrupt actions of 2 American companies: Microsoft and the engineering and construction giant Bechtel was refrained from. They were expected to be active in corruption scandals in respective Balkan countries.
In an email sent to OCCRP journalists in 2023, Sullivan acknowledged that “mostly true” is that his non-governmental organization “did not compose about the US [...] in its early years”, as its full budget was paid by Washington and the Open Society Foundation founded by billionaire and philanthropist George Soros. "We couldn't usage US government money or Soros for US stories," Sullivan wrote.
However, he added that the OCCRP employs a writer who deals with U.S. corruption cases and the organization regularly publishes reports on problems in the country, for example about businessmen who helped lawyer Donald Trump in an operation to harm Joe Biden, and about how the Pentagon spent immense amounts on arms transportation to rebel groups in Syria, as well as on a deal between the US government and an airline whose owners are associated with organised crime in Russia. These stories, however, represent a tiny percent of all OCCRP investigations, which focuses on the region of east Europe and Eurasia and late South America.
The OCCRP is besides obliged to comply with the US abroad Aid Act, according to which taxpayers' funds cannot be utilized in a way that would harm US abroad policy and the economical interests of the country. In addition, these measures should support US abroad policy.
In 2015–2019, the State Department donated OCCRP $2.2 million to a mission called "Balancing the Russian Media Sphere". In 2019–2023, the State Department donated OCCRP $1.7 million to "Strengthening Investigative Journalism in Eurasia". In 2021 and 2022, OCCRP conducted an investigation of global media called Russian Asset Tracker (the world's largest non-governmental asset database held worldwide by Russian oligarchs and political figures). The State Department besides donated OCCRP $173,324 to the mission of "disclosure and combating Venezuelan corruption". Sullivan's NGO besides adopted targeted backing from the Office for global Drugs and Enforcement of the Law of the State Department, INL (which secretly provided the first US backing to a non-governmental organization in 2008) for task Mexico. She investigated Cyprus Confidential, after which a squad of over 20 FBI agents and the American Financial Crimes Enforcement Network landed in Nicosia (the program was extended in 2022 in 2023).
The U.S. government uses reports compiled by OCCRP, strengthening their speech thanks to the Global Anti-Corruption Consortium (GACC). GACC was created in 2016 following a tender opened by the U.S. State Department. The GACC involves OCCRP and Transparency International. The consortium is co-financed by 3 governments and private donors, and the largest donor is the US government. To date, she has donated a full of US$10.8 million to the OCCRP for operations of which US$3 million was transferred to Transparency International.
The GACC mission is to encourage, on the basis of material published by the OCCRP, as well as the activities of local Transparency global offices, present in 65 countries, to "initiate judicial investigations into corruption, as well as procedures for sanctions and mobilisation of civilian society". In addition, the GACC is to lobby countries to "enhance their anti-corruption and anti-money laundering laws". In May 2024, the OCCRP prepared a peculiar study on this issue for governments (the best procedures for combating intermediaries, e.g. lawyers who facilitate the avoidance of sanctions imposed on Russia).
The study was produced in collaboration with the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a British think tank, and was funded by the British Ministry of abroad Affairs. RUSI has close links with intelligence and defence industry. 1 of his elder vice presidents is U.S. General David Petraeus, erstwhile CIA Director.
Sources: dailycaller.com / occrp.org / gijn.org / mediapart.fr
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