The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, based in Washington DC, consists of a group of over 100 journalists around the world that collaborate on investigative stories. ICIJ is the organization that launched the investigation of the Panama Papers, which are more than 11 million leaked documents about the shell corporations of Mossack Fonseca. Marina Walker Guevara, ICIJ’s deputy director, visited the University of Missouri this fall. Walker Guevara to talked to KBIA about the Panama Papers and the process ICIJ went through to break this story.

Walker Guevara: The Panama Papers were first received by German reporters at the newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and that was in early 2015 and they were contacted by an anonymous source and through encrypted means, they started to receive these 11 million records in batches.

KBIA: So you received the data through the leak. How long did it take for you to sort through this data?

Walker Guevara: Well, it took us more than one year to go through the entire process from first processing the data. The data, in these big leaks, that are becoming more and more common... it arrives very quote unquote dirty. It’s all kinds of formats, sometimes old formats that don’t exists anymore. Many of the documents are not even readable. So we had to, or thankfully we have this group of engineers and coders and others that have this technical expertise and they were able to quickly get on the task of processing the data and not only processing the data, but also uploading it to the internet and you might say ‘That’s crazy. Why are you putting this incredibly sensitive data on the Internet?’ Well, that is because of our collaboration model. If we are going to share this information with journalists from 80 countries like we ended up doing. So how are we going to do it if we don’t use the internet?”

KBIA: What were those first few steps to making sure that this data was actually correct?

Walker Guevara: What we did is we contrasted and compared this data with public data because, you know, what this data describes are events that take place in a secret world, but those events connect to events that happened in the public sphere. And so there are court records that we were able to check. There were investigations that had been announced, for example, the FIFA investigation...bribery investigation... So we were able to go and check those public documents, compare and see the names of the people and the names of the companies and make sure that they checked. And in every case that we checked that information, was really solid.

KBIA: What is still happening as a consequence to this story?

Walker Guevara: There are more than 130 ongoing investigations of all kinds in 70 countries around the world. So there’s a lot of ongoing work and we are going to see it unfold and continue to unfold in the next few months and I think years. The company at the center of the Panama Papers, Mossack Fonseca, also has had to close offices in multiple countries. There have been, as we’ve discussed before, there have been resignations; there have been arrests and raids, in different countries around the world. So the impact of the Panama Papers is very much still unfolding.