Ideas - How a network of journalists uncovered billions and toppled world leaders

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

Between $21 and $32 trillion is hidden in offshore accounts. These secret stashes have been uncovered by the work of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) — a network of almost 300 investigative journalists. Their findings have led to multiple arrests and official inquiries in more than 70 countries, and the resignations of the leaders of Pakistan, Iceland, and Malta.

1942, Europe. Soldiers find a boy surviving alone in the woods. They make him a member of Hitler's army. But what no one would know for decades, he was Jewish. Could a story so unbelievable be true? I'm Dan Goldberg. I'm from CBC's Personally, Toy Soldier. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayaad. In 2011, an Irish journalist living and working in Australia received a package. Someone sent me a disk in the mail and it was like a computer hard drive.

That's Gerard Ryle. And what he found on that disk jumpstarted multiple investigations in the ensuing years, forced world leaders to resign and exposed vast crime and corruption around the globe. Ryle is the executive director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a small but mighty non-profit organization based in Washington that is responsible for some of the biggest international investigative stories of our time. The offshore leaks, the Panama papers, the Paradise papers, the Pandora papers, just to name a few. These stories uncovered billions of dollars stashed away in secret offshore accounts. Reporters Without Borders named Ryle as one of 100 information heroes of worldwide significance.

In late March, during a surprise spring snowstorm in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Gerard, Ryle and I sat down before a packed audience at St. Thomas University. It was for the 2025 Dalton Camp Lecture in Journalism. Albeit this time, a lecture was replaced by our on-state interview. Thank you very much. Good evening, everyone.

It's so great to see you. It's so lovely to be here and welcome to you. Thank you for coming all that way. I'm sorry about the weather. It was the first time I've ever been called a snowflake. It's so fascinating to have you here with us, given everything that is going on in the world. And so I actually kind of wanted to start where many of us start when we see people

we haven't seen for a while, which is how are you doing these days with everything that's going on? Look, I think it's an unusual time to be a journalist because I think a lot of the things that were put in place to try and stop corruption are disappearing at the moment in front of our eyes because of the change in politics and other things. A lot of the work we were doing over the years have led to a lot of legislative change. But one of those things was the Corporate Transparency Act in the United States that came about because of two of our previous investigations.

And now we're seeing that disappear. And we're also seeing like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is no longer being enforced and things like the kleptocracy network, which is really going after a lot of really powerful rich people around the world that do bad things. So I guess we're almost back at a time when there was no legislative action that helps journalists. So I do think it's an unusual time. And I think it's also a bad time for us because we, you know, usually what happens

when we do a story, you usually get reaction. And I think we're at a period of time and you're probably not getting the kind of reaction you used to get. And then that goes back to a cycle where you're suddenly then you're not getting the attention you're getting and you're not getting the new stories coming forward because people are afraid to talk to you. With the changing kind of political headwinds, let's call it that, how does that affect your ability to keep running the organization that you're running?

We're an unusual organization. We rely entirely on donations to keep going. I don't pay any of the journalists that I work with. Sometimes, like our biggest project was the Pandora papers in 2021. We worked with 600 journalists in 117 different countries. 150 media organizations gave us their journalists to work with us for free. So it's very difficult for us to keep going without that kind of support. And at the moment we're also in an area where the US government has suddenly decided they don't want to support this kind of journalism.

We were working with a lot of small nonprofits around the world that were relying on USAID funding. We actually didn't really know how much funding they were getting until this crisis happened. And now like the small, you know, small nonprofits you're working with, say in Eastern Europe, suddenly they don't have any capacity to work with you. Of course the ICIJ has had, and we've all heard of them, these major international groundbreaking investigations. Sources have given you incredible material. I mean, millions of documents from secret offshore accounts. I wonder if you can give us here kind of just a sense of how much of the world's wealth is tied up in these kinds of accounts

Look when I first started researching this and it was a long time ago I was told that half of all world wealth and a third of all world trade goes through offshore tax havens So this is basically a secret world or almost like a secret in a parallel universe that exists Because in a normal situation if you have have a company, you would have to register the company, they would know who the directors are and you're responsible for that company. When you go offshore, there are no rules. You can do whatever you want and you can actually hide the true nature of the company that you're that you've just registered and you can then do whatever

you want with it. You might. Yeah, exactly. You could have a criminal enterprise running through an officer company and the country where you live in will never know. Was there ever before your efforts, was there ever a sustained effort to try to find out more about who's holding what where? There were a lot of nonprofits that were lobbying for the secrecy to end. And that was happening for about 10 years before I came across this secret

world basically through a story that I was doing in Australia. But they'd never really made any progress. You know, every time politicians promised to do something, they didn't follow through. One would think that given the fact that you've, you know, put the spotlight on this kind of, as you say, parallel world that this money lives in, that perhaps there'd be less of it sitting offshore. Is that the case? No, if anything, it actually increased and has continued to increase despite all of the work that we've been doing. It's just getting, you know, I learned a long time ago when I was investigating corruption in the police force, that when you uncover something like

that, what happens is that this corruption just gets a little bit more sophisticated. What we're seeing that all the time now what's happening in the offshore world, it's just getting they're complying with new rules that are coming in, but they're then deliberately avoiding those rules in very clever ways. We'll talk about this in more detail in a minute, but I really am curious just what ethical lines kind of are the boundaries for you in terms of what you will do to get at that data or maybe what won't you do? It's a good question.

I mean, I obviously deal with a lot of people who have stolen material and they're giving you stuff that is stolen and often they get a reaction, well, why would you take material that has been stolen? But I keep asking myself the same question, which again, is the question that my lawyer in the US keeps asking me, is the material of public interest? Your job as a journalist is to the public. It's not to courts or anyone else. It's, is this material of public interest? And if it is, then I will take the material. There are things I would never do though. I mean, I would never pay for material and there are certain ethical lines that would never go past.

But generally speaking, what I tend to do if I do manage to get a big data set is that I will sit down, look at the data first, then I would write a note to my lawyer with what I'm seeing and make a case for why we should look at the material in more detail. And that was what we did every time. Would you ever endorse the idea of hacking into any kind of database or information source? Again, if I did the hacking myself, I wouldn't be able to use the material. If I paid for the material, I wouldn't be able to use it. So I'm very, very careful not to cross that line.

But of course, I'm aware that a lot of material has been hacked. And the last 20 years have been transformational for information. Everything has been digitized. When I was a young reporter, if I wanted to find out who the directors of a company were, I used to have to go in and fill out a form. And I'd put the form in, and then I'd have to wait 24 hours to find who the three directors of the company were. And then the next day, I would find who the directors were.

I'd have to go in and fill out more forms to find out what other companies they had. It took an age to find things. These days, it's not about finding information, it's about making sense of huge amounts of information because everything has been digitized. And when things have been digitized, when people actually have access to them, they can be copied quite easily. And therefore, that's why whistleblowers now give you more and more data. I'm just curious what you, this hasn't come up a lot lately in public, but what you think

about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. I think again, the model that he was using was very much publish everything. And I think that was a model that went against journalism because the idea of journalism is that you filter the information, you only publish what's in the public interest, not everything. And I think the criticism of WikiLeaks was that it was just basically raw data dumped. And I think one of the things I wanted to do when I took over ICGA was to, was literally to take on that model in a different way to show that journalism was important. When we publish our big data sets, we do not publish all of the information that

we find. We have people's passport details, their bank accounts, like the passwords to their bank accounts. That is not in the public interest. But if it's a politician or if it's a public figure who's in there and they've got a secret offshore account and it's linked to something that you can prove is in the public interest, then that is the kind of material that I think we need to, as journalists, do. And I think it also goes back to what we weren't doing when that business model was going really well. You know, I mean, I was working during this period

and I know that when we were rich and powerful, the newspapers weren't doing this kind of investigative reporting. And we were kind of, you know, losing the trust that we had at one point with the public. And I think now we're paying the price for that because no one trusts what we're doing. And I think we have to reestablish that trust. Have you ever had that conversation with Julian Assange?

Compared notes? I haven't. I think when I first did our first big offshore project, I think I may have made a comment that Julian didn't like. And ever since then, he's always attacked me and attacked my work. But again, I still stand by what I said. I just think that we need to put a filter through the material and not just publish everything

because you don't know what damage you're doing if you publish everything wrong. Let's take a minute and just talk about your career, if that's okay. If we could go right back to the beginning, you've made some allusions to what you did at the very beginning. But you were born in Ireland and I'm wondering if you could just tell us how you got your first job in journalism. You know I was born in England. Oh well there you go. Irish parents so I was brought over to Ireland

when I was one. My first job in journalism I couldn't get a job. I came out of college, I studied journalism in Ireland. At the time there were no jobs, and the only way to get a job was to work for free. So basically I worked for what they call, worked for the Dole. And I walked into a newspaper and said, look, I want to offer my services for free. And I worked there for about a year and then a job opening came up. They didn't give it to me. And I thought, well, who did they give it to? They give it to this other guy.

And I thought, where did he work? And so then I tracked down where he worked and then I contacted them and I thought, well, who did they give it to? They give it to this other guy. And I thought, where did he work? And so then I tracked down where he worked. And then I contacted them and I said, can you give me a job? And that's how I got my first job, my first paid job. What was that first newsroom like? Just paint a picture because it's so alien to all of us who work in newsrooms today. You know, you think you're looking at some like high end investigative journal. I was, you're talking about Ireland, a three-person paper, basically.

I worked for a small newspaper that basically was famous all over Ireland because the owner was a circus magician. Just on the side. Yeah. And basically, one week we published an entirely blank front page and only had a headline, No News This Week. How did that go over? Well, I remember at the time, my biggest scoop from then, and again, a long time ago, was about mysterious disappearance of undergarments from clotheslines around the town.

Was that front page news? No, a headline was, Nicker's nicker around the town. Was that front page news? No, a headline was, nickers, nicker on the loose. You know. I'm not making this up. Was it the magician who wrote that headline? Oh yeah, he thought it was funny to be, and I think at the time it wasn't exactly frowned upon

to kind of like to embellish stories. It was really only when I left Ireland and went to Australia that I realized that journalism was very different if you did it right. And it was very important to get the facts right. It was really only when I left Ireland and went to Australia that I realized that journalism was very different if you did it right. And it was very important to get the facts right. I'm really curious what it is about you. Like what quality, what character, what part of your character that kind of made you go

in the direction of the, you know, excavation and investigation and that kind of interest. What is it about you? You know, I'm not a good writer. I'm not necessarily even a good editor, but I'm very dogged. And I think when I left Ireland, I knew nobody in Australia. I turned up out of the blue and I had written to the two newspapers in Melbourne, Australia, and they both had sent me rejection letters. And so I got on the phone box, you know, this is when we had phone boxes, and I rang

the editor's office and said, I've got a letter here saying you want to see me. And it turned out that the secretary of the editor was from Northern Ireland, so she just burst out laughing and told me to come in the next day. And then when I did go in, they said, okay, I wouldn't take no for an answer, I just kept pestering them. And they said, come in for a week. And then every week, at the end of every week, I said, can I come back on Monday? And that's how I got that job in Australia.

And initially, the first people in your sights were the police. No, that was by accident because after five months of doing this, turning up, the worst job in the paper was to do the night shift on the police round. So this is where you had to turn up at 7.30 at night until 3 in the morning. And you had to monitor the radio of all the crime that was happening. And that's how I got to learn about the workings of the police force. At the time where I worked in Victoria, Australia, which is where Melbourne is, the police force had the best reputation of Australia.

So if other police forces needed a new chief, they would come to Victoria. And of course, it was like this perfect police force. But of course, by working at night and working in the way that I was working, driving around the city, listening to this radio, and listening to people who were ringing at night to the newspaper, I realized that this place force wasn't quite the perfect place force that it seemed to be. But there's the dogged character in play again. Well again, I think I got very lucky again.

I always get very lucky. Someone started telling me that there was a lot of corruption in this place force. And it started with one story. And I learned a very early lesson there that if you write about something, there's always somebody out there who knows more. And so I started doing smaller stories on minor police corruption. And before I knew it, I was the only police reporter in the city who was getting all the calls from people who knew what was really happening in the forest. And they ended up getting some fantastic sources who were telling me about all of these investigations

that were being covered up by the police. And this went on for a number of years. And by the end, I think I had about, I think I had 10% of the police force under investigation. Wow. But it is actually one of those lessons that you learn as a young reporter that really stick with you throughout your career

and your own career has illustrated that stories beget stories beget stories. Exactly. You've got to start somewhere. I think the best advice I would ever give you is that your audience is always your best resource. And there is the old adage about insiders and outsiders, like the people that you see on TV all the time, they rely on their sources so much that they're actually captured by them. But when you're like me, or you know, you're basically an outsider, you don't have any sources. I have no sources.

I've gone through my own career almost having no sources. But you weren't then relying on anybody. And so therefore you're able to do whatever story came along. So later on, you went on to the Sydney Morning Herald, and there you started its first investigative team, if I understand correctly. Can you talk about an investigation into a company called Firepower? Yeah, I'd been there for a couple of years when, you know, I just spent a number of months researching a story about the mafia and I wasn't getting on very well with the editor at the time.

And he said no to the story and I was despondent. And again I got a little bit lucky. I walked into the kitchen that we had there at the time and the sports editor was in the kitchen making a cup of coffee and he had a packet of pills in his hand and he told me, he said, oh I've just come from the launch of the Sydney King's basketball season and they've got this new sponsor and it's called Firepower. And they've got these pills that you put on your motor vehicle. And these pills make the fuel last 20% longer and get rid of all the toxic emissions in the car. And he started telling me about this amazing company

that was so secretive, that had all these contracts in Russia with Russian railways and with armies around the world and navies around the world. And it was all h hush hush and they were making so much money. Were you impressed or suspicious? Well again, like he said to me, Rod Allen was his name and he said, you know, various drawing in, I put my motor vehicle and I didn't notice any different. So I thought, okay, and I turned the packet around and the only endorsement that the pill had was from a couple of taxi drivers in Greece saying,

yeah, mate, they're great, you know? And I thought, well, there's something a bit weird about that. And then Rod was telling me that this company had become the biggest sponsor of sport in Australia. They'd literally were sponsoring all the national rugby teams, which is very big over there. They'd actually just bought the Sydney Kings basketball team. And the

event that it come from was in Sydney Harbour, right next to the Opera House, on a Navy ship. And the players were draped over the guns and it was like the firepower and all that stuff. He said they were splashing money everywhere. Because I was so despondent about having my other story be knocked back, I thought I'll do a feature story on this company. So I literally did the simple thing, which is to Google them and see what they... and I found hardly anything there. And then I looked at their public statements.

They said that they were being used by the Australian Army, they were being used by Holden, which is General Motors. And I did what any reporter would do. I just contacted the Australian Army and everyone said, I've never heard of this company. So it was a good start. That's a very good start. And all of this kind of led to a pivotal moment in your life when a disc arrived. Yeah, well, there's a lot happened in between life when a disc arrived? Yeah, well, there's a lot happened in between. So I basically write the story about this pill

and like any good investigative reporter in Australia, I ended up getting sued. I had four lawsuits against me, two personally and two against the paper. And this went on for about two years. I mean, it was a giant Ponzi scheme that was going on here. What they had done is that they had registered a company in the British Virgin Islands, created millions of shares, and then were selling their shares illegally around the world.

I published a story, ended up getting sued. It was on for about 18 months. What was the accusation though? What were they suing you for? They were saying that I was wrong. I mean, I was facing, at that point I was facing attacks in the Australian Senate because it turned out that the Australian government had decided that this company was an example for all other Australian companies around the world. And the leaders of the company were paraded at events in embassies around the world.

And the company had also been given about $600,000 in taxpayer grants for sales. It had never made. But still. And you were writing about all these things? Well, I was writing and I was, you know, look, I was in meetings with barristers who were holding up the pills saying, how do you know it doesn't work? And I brought it to a university, I had it analyzed,

and it was actually the same material that was used in mothballs. And that's all it was, yeah. Wow. And yeah, but I still had to prove as. And that's all it was. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, but I still had to prove as a journalist that it didn't work. And a lot of the case against me was that, well, we say it works, you say it doesn't work.

And there was doubt there. And this went on for about 18 months until finally the company could no longer pay the lawyers who were suing me. That was the only reason it fell over. That's extraordinary. But you used some pretty basic journalism to break it open entirely. Well, you know, it also gave me an opportunity to write a book about the whole thing.

One thing about being caught up on litigation is the worst thing that could ever happen to you. Trust me, every journalist is caught up and it will tell you the same thing. It takes over your life. But, you know, I tried to turn it into something. So I ended up writing a book about this company. And that's what you're alluding to.

After I wrote the book, someone then sent me a disk in the mail, and it was like a computer hard drive. And it was the company, the offshore law firm in Singapore that had set up all the offshore structures for this particular firepower pill company. But you didn't know that when you got this desk. Well, I had a fair idea. Another tip for you as a journalist, try to get stuff anonymously, is because if you can always then say you don't know who the source was.

And so when I was dealing with the sources, I was saying, well, look, if you wanted to give me this material, please just send it to me in a, you know, in a brown paper bag at my newspaper address. And when it arrived by then, my biggest challenge was understanding it and trying to work out what it was. So what did you do with it? Well, at that stage, I had taken a new job in Canberra and I basically bribed the IT guy with beer to try and open up the disk and to let me know what was in there. And I found lots of

spreadsheets of names. So I found a lot of material about my company, but at that point I'd written the book and I thought, well, there's nothing new that I can really do with this. About firepower. About firepower. But I'm not making this one up. But I saw all these names from around the world. And I remember distinctly seeing a Canadian name

that got me really interested in it. It was a guy. Do you remember the name? Ah, I don't. and I can't even replicate what I'm about to tell you because I did try and search for this afterwards and I still can't find it but it's a true story. So I saw this Canadian guy and he was apparently he'd been killed involving some sort of drug deal. I think it was in Toronto and there I saw an email address with his offshore company and the email address was something like ontherun at hotmail.com, you know.

And I began, honestly it was like a light bulb for me. I thought, oh my God, I wish I knew a Canadian journalist I could give this to. But when you're an investigative reporter and you're working in one country, you really have no interest in helping anybody else. And so I sat on the material. For how long did you sit on the material? A few months later, again, out of the blue, I got a call from Washington, D.C. I had been a fellow at the University of Michigan for a year.

And the head of that program was sitting on an organization called the Center for Public Integrity in Washington. And part of the Center for Public Integrity was Washington. And part of the Center for Public Integrity was the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. And they were desperately searching for a new director. I didn't know at the time why, but he was asking me as a favor if I could just apply for the job. And eventually I agreed to apply simply out of a favor for him.

What I hadn't realized with the ICIJ at the time was really just a fundraising device for the centre, for the larger organisation. And they only had one grant, like the ICIJ only had one grant, it was from a Dutch foundation. And the Dutch foundation had been very critical. The ICIJ had been going for about 12 years at that point, And they had given it a three year grant. They were saying, we won't give you another three year grant because you're too American focused. And so I thought I was being hired for my skills,

but in fact, the only reason I was being hired is that I wasn't American. But of course, I did have this disc in my back pocket. Right, did you tell them about the disc? I did not. Because again, I was worried that maybe it was a story, maybe it wasn't a story. I couldn't unpack the disc.

It turned out the disc had two and a half million records. And my beer-consuming IT person had only allowed me to look at a very small part of it. But I had an instinct that there had to be a good story in there somewhere. I just needed to work out a way of doing it. You're listening to Exposing Wrongdoing in the World on CBC Radio's Ideas, a conversation with the internationally renowned investigative journalist Gerard Ryle.

I'm Nala Ayaad. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts.

So let's return to the story being told on stage at St. Thomas University in in Bridgerton, New Brunswick. It's 2011. Gerard Ryle has a mysterious disc in his back pocket. He wants to somehow figure out what exactly is on it. And that's his motivation for taking a new job as executive director at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. But when he arrives at the ICIJ offices in Washington, he finds out it wouldn't be so easy a task. Where do you even begin when you get that kind of data?

And I know now you know, because you've done a few of these, but back then when you had never been faced with that kind of enormity of information, what do you do? Where do you start? Well, you look for help. I mean, what I've always learned is that you're no good on your own. If you're a journalist and you're willing to give a story up and get the help of others, you can end up with a much better story.

And so I immediately thought, well, I'll take this job and then I'll turn this little organization. And at this stage, ICIJ was like three people, plus me. Nice offices in Washington, surely? No, we had mice running through the office. I know for a fact, because one of my colleagues at the time used to catch the mice, and she'd release the mice across the street.

Very kind of her. But I only had three people. Look, they promised me this huge budget, huge staff. They talked it up, and of course I landed there, and my only job was to try and get a renewal for this grant. But I also realized that the advantage I had was that they couldn't really touch me. I could do whatever I wanted as long as I could get the renewal. I did get the renewal, which was good news. I had no idea how to unpack this material, And obviously, the organization I joined didn't,

the parent organization didn't know either. So I had to find somebody else who could. So I had a small budget at that point because I got the renewal. And so I used some freelancers that we knew from our network. But we had this crazy idea that we would copy the disk and then put copies of the disk in different parts of the world.

And then reporters would somehow fly in, magically find stories and then put copies of the disc in different parts of the world and then reporters would somehow fly in, magically find stories and then go home to their offices. It was terrible. The only way I could understand what was in the disc was I learned from my source that the tax offices around the world that had been given copies of this disc years earlier were using the software called NUX, which was an Australian software, and they were paying a fortune for it. And so I called up NUX and it turned out it was run by an Irish guy.

So again, look, and I said to him, look, I really want to use your software, but I'm a nonprofit and can I use it for free? And so he said to me, yeah, and he just laughed. He said, look, I'll give you 10 copies. It was about $100,000 worth of software. And he just said, go get the bad guys. You know? Wonderful. So we were able to suddenly look at the material,

but we still didn't work out the logistics of how to do this. We spent months wasting time. How were librarians involved in? Oh, that's later. Is that later? Yeah, that's later. Okay, well, we'll get to that. Yeah. And we eventually did publish that Oh, that's later. Is that later? Yeah, that's later. Okay, well we'll get to that. We eventually did publish that story, that disc. It was called Official Links in 2013.

It was a really big deal at the time. People don't remember it, but we had about 42 media partners working with us on it. And by then we'd learned how to do that kind of work. We learned that instead of having the disc in different places, you needed to put all this material into the cloud and give reporters access to a 24-7. We basically developed our own software. That project was a big success, so I was able to get more budget and convince more foundations to give me more.

I had more people, I had more resources. Then it led to a whole series, like to your point earlier about if you let people know you're there, they come to you. I suddenly started getting a whole series of other leaks. We got this thing called Luxembourg leaks, which was a big leak into Luxembourg and how Luxembourg was basically being used as a back door into Europe for big corporations to avoid taxes. We also then got a big leak of material from HSBC Switzerland, where private bank accounts. And those stories led to what became known

as the Panama Papers and what happened there.