The International Consortium of Independent Journalists' Biggest Investigation — Pandora Papers

October, 3 was a significant event. Unlike another equally high-profile investigation — the Panama Papers — the current one, the Pandora Papers, is not a bad one to remember. If the Panama Papers passed me by because I was 12 years old at the time, the massive revelation of the offshore documents is truly a historic event that we are witnessing together with you now.

So, the International Consortium of Independent Journalists — ICIJ — released an investigation based on a massive leak of offshore documents. The consortium consists of more than 100 journalists from around the world, but this time the only Russian participants were Istories Media, a small media 1 year old, whose hallmark was an investigation into nepotism in Putin's inner circle, “Kirill & Kate”. Yesterday's investigators at Novaya Gazeta took it upon themselves to analyze the leaked documents again. As they revealed, there turned out to be a great many officials and oligarchs from all over the world.

Of the most interesting things in the investigation, I will note a few texts:

• Konstantin Ernst runs one of the most propagandistic channels and puts Moscow's movie theaters up for sale. After reading about his machinations with cinemas, I got the feeling that the sale of the Solovey Cinema, which was one of the most democratic theaters in terms of prices and often showed classics of world cinema, for which many Muscovites loved it, was the work of Ernst himself. It was also about the cinema, which was decorated with Azerbaijani sandstone (!). And such attitude to the cultural heritage, in my opinion, is unacceptable. Businessmen in their self-interest demolish these atypical, high-quality cinemas and build colored panel houses in their place, turning everything into dormitory districts and destroying the history. For some reason there are no questions about the destruction of cultural sites.

• Many people in Putin's entourage have also registered offshore companies. It's not just about the virtuoso Roldugin, but also about Svetlana Krivonogikh, Putin's alleged girlfriend, whose portrait Proekt Media first described in its investigation. She, it turns out, registers an offshore company and uses it just like the members of the mafia gang, the Neapolitan Camorra. But the connection with them apparently does not interest her.

• Gref, the head of Sberbank, a progressive technocrat who believes that digital education is the future. He can be relied on by the head of state as an understanding man. And here it is very symbolic how Istories Media adds a quote of Putin's words about "deoffshorization" in every such description, thus showing that Putin's approach is absolutely indifferent to the words of the "boss".

• The rest of the most interesting stuff is described on the ICIJ and OCCPR websites. The most recent is a story about Ukrainian President Zelensky's off-shores, registering a house in London "next door" to Sherlock Holmes and owning an off-shore together with a comedy friend. Russian propaganda is in an ambiguous situation: it benefits them to praise the investigators who discovered the corruption of the Kazakh and Ukrainian presidents, the Czech prime minister and others, but they have to ignore certain facts about their Russian leadership. So what is said about Zelensky and the "Maidan" is good, and what is said about us is done on the money of "foreign puppeteers".

You can read about the rest in Big Picture on the OCCPR website or in the relevant section on the Istories Media website. The latter prove to us that journalism is important by constantly posting cards with stories of instances where journalism has helped the community in a resonant way in their Telegram channel. But it's not enough to talk — it's important to do. And by being the media involved in the biggest investigation in recent memory, they've proven that. Thank you to independent journalists for doing such important work.

Image: The Pandora Papers — OCCPR