With revelations about tax evasion and dictator money, newspapers such as the “Süddeutsche”, the “Spiegel” and the “Guardian” caused a stir. Your research partners were biased, as is now evident.
Color attack on Credit Suisse on May 1st, Zurich 2019.
In February 2022, international media will launch an attack on Credit Suisse and the Swiss financial center. It's about autocrats, corrupt rulers, suspected war criminals and criminals who have their money in hidden Switzerland – from the Jordanian king to the head of Yemen's secret service to the former Siemens managing director in Nigeria.
“Suisse Secrets” is the title of the scandal; the French newspaper “Le Monde”, the British “Guardian” and the “New York Times” are among those involved. The “Süddeutsche Zeitung” is in charge, which claims to have access to 30,000 accounts from an anonymous source. The editorial team knows nothing about their identity, but they pretend to know their motives: The source “believes” that Swiss banking secrecy is immoral.
At least $47 million from Washington
The “Süddeutsche Zeitung” alone spreads the revelations in more than twenty articles. They have titles such as: “The Treasury of Dictators”, “Banking secrecy has made Switzerland rich”, “Indignation has arisen over Switzerland” or “Countries like Switzerland should be ashamed”. All of these reports are also supported and made possible by a journalistic organization that helps evaluate the data and that only a few are known in Europe: the investigative platform Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, or OCCRP for short.
If you believe Drew Sullivan, the head and co-founder of the OCCRP, it is the world's most important reporting organization “you've never heard of.” This is how he puts it in an interview. But now a debate has recently broken out about his association of journalists, which is not least about the question of the extent to which journalists can be exploited for the economic and political interests of the USA with stories like “Suisse Secrets”.
As the French platform “Médiapart” and other media have shown, the OCCRP is largely financed by the US government. This is particularly through the Foreign Ministry and the development agency USAID. Since the organization was founded in 2007, researchers are said to have received at least $47 million from Washington.
As OCCRP boss Drew Sullivan confirmed to journalists from “Médiapart”, the US government contributed around 46 percent of the budget between 2014 and 2023. There was also $14 million from European countries, including Great Britain, Sweden and Switzerland, which indirectly supported a project in Romania.
ARD broadcaster stops research and collaboration
Drew Sullivan founded the OCCRP in Sarajevo. Since then, it has uncovered numerous cases of corruption, crime and money laundering, including in Russia. Employees work on all continents of the world, with a focus on Eastern Europe. Together with other media outlets, Sullivan's employees published the “Panama Papers” in 2016 and the “Paradise Papers” a year later. According to the OCCRP, the own revelations have forced numerous leaders to resign and $10 billion has been confiscated.
Authoritarian states and governments have gratefully noted the recent revelations about Sullivan's own network. Some use it as an opportunity to persecute OCCRP-affiliated journalists as enemy agents.
In Switzerland the reactions are rather cautious. The Tamedia newspapers that have cooperated with the OCCRP have so far ignored the story. The excitement is greater in Germany, where several major media outlets work with Sullivan's people, including “Zeit”, “Süddeutsche”, “Spiegel” and the public broadcaster NDR, which is part of ARD.
The affair is particularly delicate for NDR: it originally initiated research into the OCCRP's involvement with the US government, but then stopped it for reasons that were not yet understandable. This was despite the fact that two journalists had already produced a film. According to the company, the collaboration with the Sullivans Organization has been “on hold”. Sullivan accuses one of NDR's researchers of being a Russian spy. He sees himself as the victim of an act of revenge – and assures that there have never been any attempts by the US government to “influence anything”.
“Small country, big money”
Unsurprisingly, this view is also shared by the media that counted on Sullivan's services for the “Suisse Secrets” and other data leaks. The “Süddeutsche Zeitung” writes that the financing by the US government had long been known. The OCCRP cooperated selectively and on a project-related basis, freely and without any interference.
Hardly anyone doubts the quality of the research in which the OCCRP was involved. The organization was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023. Financial dependence on the US government has never subjugated people, but has treated them discreetly. Most partners seem to be surprised by the extent of the financial flows. The New York Times, for example, admitted to Médiapart that they knew nothing about these dimensions.
The assurances of the OCCRP and its European partners that the US government has no influence on journalistic work have not yet been refuted. However, influences in the media can also be expressed indirectly – for example in the question of who was attacked and who was spared. This is even more evident since Drew Sullivan said in an interview that he was not allowed to use US government money for research in the USA. Even with its media allies, the OCCRP primarily uncovers scandals outside the USA.
This not only in countries hostile to the USA, such as Russia and Venezuela, but also in smaller states that hoard money from autocrats and other dubious figures and offer themselves to companies as tax-efficient locations. In addition to Switzerland, which was listed as a global center of depravity for weeks at the beginning of 2022 with the “Suisse Secrets”, the research is concerned with Cyprus, Bermuda, Panama, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. In 2017, the Netherlands was denounced as a “tax haven” in the “Paradise Papers”.
Four years later, it was the turn of the “Luxembourg tax haven” in the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”. Title: “Small country, big money”. According to the tenor of the article, the Luxembourgers have learned nothing, “a tax haven remains a tax haven”. As was later the case with the “Suisse Secrets,” the newspaper worked with the OCCRP. There is no information about its financing; in the article it appears as a normal “media partner”. The Süddeutsche praises the USA for this. With the Corporate Transparency Act, these would have heralded nothing less than “the end of the USA as a tax haven”.
They are less concerned with the US financial center
The media reports that came with the help of the OCCRP state not only served the public interest, but also indirectly served the economic and political interests of the United States. Even if this was probably not the intention of the journalists, they discredited competitors of the US financial center with the help of an organization supported by American money.
This is not ignored by Drew Sullivan's investigative team, but it is treated with comparative care. There is a long article about the Delaware tax haven on the OCCRP website. However, he is 14 years old. As part of the “Pandora Papers,” the state of South Dakota also came into the focus of journalist consortia. Among other things, the President of Ecuador parked his money there. The OCCRP published an article about this, but it did not deal with the topic.
There are good reasons for investigative journalists to examine the American financial center. Together with the Tax Justice Network – an organization that has been campaigning against tax avoidance of all kinds worldwide for decades – the country is currently the number one tax haven in the world. Small states such as Delaware, Nevada and South Dakota have specialized in the clientele that previously valued the “immoral” Swiss banks.
They hide their money in anonymous shell companies or imperishable trusts. The USA has introduced new rules as part of the Biden administration that should lead to more transparency. But the evidence for this is still pending; the law will only apply from this year. In Delaware alone, almost 300,000 new companies were founded in 2023. In South Dakota, funds held in local trusts have quickly doubled in the last four years, to $680 billion.
Real estate dealers and auction houses also benefit from the secrecy in the USA. A Russian oligarch, for example, bought up empty office towers in Cleveland after the financial crisis in order to hide his money out of the country. Attempts to force these service providers to be more transparent have often failed.
The USA protects its tax havens
To put it bluntly, this is because the USA is too powerful. If other countries take too lax action against money laundering, they will be put under pressure by international organizations and the Americans until they give in. But no one can force the USA to dry up its tax havens. When it comes to preventing money laundering, they perform significantly worse than Switzerland – finds the FATF, the global task force against money laundering.
When Switzerland froze billions of dollars in Russian funds from 2022 – and was scolded by the US ambassador for proceeding too cautiously – many in the Swiss financial center were annoyed. They expected that Russian assets that were not subject to sanctions would now simply be moved to the Arab Emirate or the United States.
The economist Joseph Stiglitz also wrote in the wake of the “Suisse Secrets” affair that Switzerland rightly complained that problematic activities were “merely relocated to Miami, London or other money laundering centers”. There is hardly any reliable evidence for this so far. For organizations like OCCRP, this would be an ideal starting point for research in the USA.
Questions from the NZZ to the OCCRP as to why so little attention is paid to the USA remain unanswered. Drew Sullivan's Organization website has a link to an article about the U.S. leadership in shadow finance. However, if you click on it, you will end up with an obituary for the Swiss investor Marc Rich, who was charged with tax evasion in the USA.
It's probably a coincidence, but it fits.
