On October 3, 2021, the findings of the largest journalistic investigation ever conducted were published, revealing a vast network of an underground economy that favors the already rich and powerful, further increasing global inequality.
The investigation was named the Pandora Papers and was carried out by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) with the participation of more than 600 journalists from around the world who investigated the 11.9 million documents and 2.9 terabytes of leaked data. When the pieces of this huge puzzle began to fall together, it was revealed who the real owners of offshore companies, secret bank accounts, private planes, yachts, luxury homes, and even art pieces by Picasso or Banski were.
For the third episode of the Data on the Record podcast series, Thanasis Troboukis interviews Venezuelan journalist, Emilia Diaz Strack, research editor of the ICIJ and coordinator of the team that worked in Latin America.
What was the methodology they followed? What tools did they use? How do they put order into all this unstructured material to produce those databases that lead to the truth?