OCCRP wins global data journalism award for its Troika Laundromat project

SRT grantee the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) has won in the large media category of the global data journalism award, the Sigma Awards, successfully competing in a category with the Washington Post, ProPublica, and Center for Public Integrity among others. The Sigma Awards is a new data journalism competition which aims to celebrate the best data journalism around the world, and to empower, elevate and enlighten the global community of data journalists. This is the second time OCCRP has won this award. In recognition of the award, OCCRP is invited to the International Journalism Festival, to be held in Perugia in April, to present their work.

The award is in recognition of OCCRP’s project Troika Laundromat. Described as “part thriller, part blockbuster, part spy movie”, the project is an investigation of over 3,000 companies and banks across fifteen countries, exploring their involvement in “channelling money out of Russia.” The project unveiled more than €26 billion in transfers between 2006 and 2013. First published in March 2019, with stories being added on an ongoing basis, the impact of the Troika Laundromat was immediate and widespread; many banks were implicated and saw a drop in their share value, and Members of the European Parliament took action against money laundering on an EU-wide scale. It had political ramifications in a number of EU member states, including in Cyprus, where the President faced questions over his his alleged links to the scandal.

More information on the Data Journalism Sigma Awards can be found here https://datajournalism.com/awards