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Welcome back!
I want to take a moment to thank you for opening our email! 🥰 I know too well that your inbox can become full of emails from news organizations, your favorite brands, and exciting holiday destinations for when this is all over. Here at ICIJ, we appreciate you choosing to read our stories! And, let me tell you, there is something extra-exciting coming in the weeks ahead – so stay tuned.
Given that you see the value in our email, I wondered if you’d tell just one acquaintance about it? We want to grow the number of people who read our stories – we think they’re important and unique. If you're on Twitter – you could tell your followers!
Now for this week’s stories!
The whistleblower behind Luanda Leaks has been released from custody in Portugal while he awaits trial. Rui Pinto shared the 715,000 files at the heart of Luanda Leaks with the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa – which then shared them with ICIJ. He is also the source of Football Leaks, which revealed tax dodging by soccer players. William Bourdon, one of Pinto’s lawyers, called him the Edward Snowden of international corruption. (Snowden is the American whistleblower who leaked classified United States National Security Agency information.) Pinto’s lawyers, and his international supporters, believe he should be protected as a whistleblower. His trial begins later this year.
Separately, following his release, Pinto enraged Angola billionaire Isabel dos Santos on Twitter last week.
11,500 years. That’s how long it would have taken Renu Tikamdas Tharani, who had a declared income of less than $4,000, to earn the $39.7 million she had sitting in a Genevan HSBC account in 2006, according to India’s Income Tax Appellate Tribunal. Tharani’s name was linked to our Swiss Leaks investigation, which enabled authorities to reassess her tax returns over the past 16 years. The tribunal told Tharani it was up to her to prove she didn’t own the assets in the account and explain where the money came from. “If a person has nothing to hide, we believe the person would have cooperated in obtaining the bank statements,” the judgment said.
Hopefully you’ve heard of our document analysis tool, Datashare, by now. (If you haven’t, it’s available for everyone to use – you find more info here!) The next step in our development is to build DatashareNetwork, so reporters can easily and securely share their documents. To make it happen, we’ve teamed up with the renowned Swiss university EPFL. “By combining trust and technology at this level, we believe this new tool will enable even more powerful investigations,” said ICIJ’s Soline Ledésert. Privacy and security are the top priorities – so that journalists are protected when sharing sensitive information across the world.
Until next week!
Amy Wilson-Chapman
ICIJ’s community engagement editor
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