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Making Transparency Possible Making Transparency Possible Roy Krøvel and Mona Thowsen, Editors Making Transparency Possible AN INTERDISCIPLINARY DIALOGUE © 2019 Roy Krøvel, Mona Thowsen, Frian Aarsnes, Mahima Achuthan, Kristine Aghalaryan, William Bourdon, Behlül Çalışkan, Lina Chawaf, Antoine Deltour, Elisabeth Eide, Ingrid Fadnes, Raphaël Halet, Birgitte Kjos Fonn, Johannes Kr. Kristjansson, Amélie Lefebvre, Simona Levi, Craig McKune, Karl Ove Moene, Ryan Powell, Jenik Radon, Nandini Ravichandran, Anya Schiffrin, Tina Søreide, Petter Slaatrem Titland and Rodrigo Véliz Estrada. This work is protected under the provisions of the Norwegian Copyright Act (Act No. 2 of May 12, 1961, relating to Copyright in Literary, Scientific and Artistic Works) and published Open Access under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). This license allows third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for non-commercial purposes only. Third parties are prohibited from applying legal terms or technological measures that restrict others from doing anything permitted under the terms of the license. Note that the license may not provide all of the permissions necessary for an intended reuse; other rights, for example publicity, privacy, or moral rights, may limit third party use of the material. This book has been made possible with financial support from Publish What You Pay Norway, The Research Council of Norway and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD). ISBN Print Edition: 978-82-02-63749-1 ISBN PDF: 978-82-02-59532-6 ISBN EPUB: 978-82-02-63729-3 ISBN HTML: 978-82-02-63728-6 ISBN XML: 978-82-02-63730-9 DOI: https://doi.org/10.23865/noasp.64 The chapters comprising Part II of this anthology have been peer-reviewed. Cover Design: Cappelen Damm AS Cover Illustration: Getty Images. The image is used under license from Getty Images and cannot be reused without express permission from Getty Images. Cappelen Damm Akademisk/NOASP www.noasp.no [email protected] Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................... 7 Mona Thowsen and Roy Krøvel Part I ......................................................................................................................21 Chapter 1 It Happens Overnight ...................................................................23 Craig McKune Chapter 2 The Coal-Case of Guatemala .........................................................31 Rodrigo Véliz Estrada Chapter 3 Armenian “Hero” of Panama Papers Becomes a Fight- er Against Corruption ................................................................... 37 Kristine Aghalaryan Chapter 4 Do Stories from Your Heart ..........................................................43 Johannes Kr. Kristjansson Chapter 5 Safety in Journalism in Syria .........................................................51 Lina Chawaf Chapter 6 “We, the citizens, can fight against corruption.” Open Source Jailing of Corrupt Bankers and Politicians Device: A Case Study ..................................................55 Simona Levi Chapter 7 A Long Way to Go for Whistleblowers ......................................... 67 William Bourdon and Amélie Lefebvre Chapter 8 Whistleblowing on Luxembourg’s Tax Practices ......................... 81 Antoine Deltour Chapter 9 Being a Whistleblower ..................................................................87 Raphaël Halet Chapter 10 What Tools Can States Use When Faced with Systematic Tax Avoidance? ..........................................................93 Frian Aarsnes 5 contents Part II: Peer-Reviewed Chapters ...................................................................... 107 Chapter 11 Combating Corruption: Investigative Journalists on the Frontlines .........................................................................109 Kalle Moene and Tina Søreide Chapter 12 Investigative Journalism on Oil, Gas and Mining: Has Donor-Driven Use of Digital Technology Made a Difference? ..................................................................... 137 Anya Schiffrin and Ryan Powell Chapter 13 Beneficial Ownership: Filling the Gap in Transparency and Accountability in the Extractive Industries and Improving Governance ................................................................ 159 Jenik Radon, Mahima Achuthan and Nandini Ravichandran Chapter 14 It’s All in the Game: Journalism, Whistleblowing and Democracy Under the Rules of the Global Economy ...................181 Petter Slaatrem Titland Chapter 15 What Is a Leak, Who Is a Whistleblower? An Evaluation Within the Scope of the Cumhuriyet Newspaper, Can Dündar and MİT Trucks Case ......................... 209 Behlül Çalışkan Chapter 16 Chilling Effects on Free Expression: Surveillance, Threats and Harassment .............................................................227 Elisabeth Eide Chapter 17 Reporting on Unfinished Business: Emerging Digital Media and Investigative Journalism in Guatemala ....................243 Ingrid Fadnes Chapter 18 “What someone wants kept in the dark.” An Analysis of the Norwegian Panama Papers Coverage ...............................263 Birgitte Kjos Fonn Chapter 19 Making Sense of Overwhelming Flows of Financial Data ..........287 Mona Thowsen and Roy Krøvel About the Authors ............................................................................................. 315 6 Introduction Mona Thowsen Publish What You Pay Norway (PWYP Norway) Roy Krøvel OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University Many recent examples of international investigative journalism seem to follow the same pattern: Someone employed in a large and often multi- national company such as a bank or a law firm becomes so dismayed by the things they witness that they decide to tell someone. This someone is typically a journalist. For the whistleblower, life will most likely never be quite the same. For two years, Raphaël Halet writes in this volume, he “lived a real thriller, a story worthy of a spy novel”. In retrospect, how- ever, most whistleblowers realize that the thriller aspect quickly fades. As Halet notes after years of legal struggles, in reality he had “sacrificed” his “personal welfare for the common good”. For the journalist, working on a major leak could bring professional recognition and personal sat- isfaction. Most journalists can count on the backing of a community of journa lists and other supporters. Nevertheless, as Craig McKune, Lina Chawaf, Rodrigo Véliz and others in this book explain, investigating the rich and powerful can also lead to serious legal or personal safety problems. This book is about illicit financial flows. More precisely, it is about journalists, auditors, lawyers, activists, whistleblowers and others who have risked much to shed light on this opaque world. The stories range from revelations of murky deals in South Africa, the fallout from the Citation: Thowsen, M., & Krøvel, R. (2019). Introduction. In R. Krøvel & M. Thowsen (Eds.), Making Transparency Possible. An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (pp. 7–19). Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akademisk. https://doi.org/10.23865/noasp.64.ch0. License: CC BY-NC 4.0 7 introduction Panama Papers in Iceland, Syria and Armenia, the dirty business of coal mining in Guatemala, and the luxurious life of bankers in Spain. The whistleblowers behind some of the most notorious financial scan- dals speak, as do lawyers and specialist auditors. The book also includes peer-reviewed articles from an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners from the fields of law, economics and journalism. Revela- tions such as Lux Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers demonstrate how much societies around the world lose because of illicit financial flows, corruption and tax fraud. The articles in this book ask what can be done to make transparency possible. Only when key financial information is transparently reported for each country it will be possible to expose and hinder illicit financial flows and to discuss how to distribute wealth fairly between states and within states, and to see how value is created and distributed within a company. Much of what we know about illicit financial flows is because of whistleblowers and investigative journalists. The Luxembourg Leaks, for instance, was a journalistic investigation conducted by the Interna- tional Consortium of Investigative Journalists published in 2014 based on confidential information about Luxembourg’s tax rulings set up by PricewaterhouseCoopers from 2002 to 2010. The tax rulings for over three hundred multinational companies based in Luxembourg were made public. The investigation shed light on a tax regime that was highly beneficial to multinational companies. International accounting firms set up tax rulings with schemes to transfer revenues to Luxem- bourg. Findings also showed that multinationals used mechanisms such as transfer pricing and intra group loans to move profits out of countries to reduce taxes. Swiss Leaks (2015) has been called the biggest leak in Swiss banking his- tory. It was started by information leaked by a computer analyst concern- ing the accounts of 100,000 clients and 20,000 offshore companies held by HSBC in Geneva. HSBC later agreed to pay €300 million to avoid going to trial in France for enabling tax fraud. More recently, the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers have made headlines for revealing more about global illicit
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