Dataharvest 2025 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

The choices made by consumers, corporations, and financiers in the Global North ripple across borders, often shaping the lives and environments of communities in the Global South. From sourcing raw materials to funding large-scale projects, some decisions result in exploitative practices, environmental degradation, and corruption in vulnerable regions. Journalism can play a critical role in unveiling these hidden connections by tracing supply chains and financial flows. The data and research team from the Pulitzer Center will share the techniques, data and tools they used to help journalists uncover the supply chains and financial enablers behind commodities and projects that contributed to environmental degradation and human rights abuse in the Global South. This session will dive into the reporting methodologies behind environmental investigations on rainforest and ocean issues that the team has conducted. The team will provide participants with an investigative framework and introduce them to both the open and private databases and tools used for such investigation. The purpose of this session is to allow participants to replicate the methodologies for their own investigations and to have practical guidelines to kickstart such investigations.

Customs records and open-source databases are a goldmine, but they can also be overwhelming. With so much data, where do you begin looking for stories? How can you be sure that what you're seeing is what you think it is? And how should you organise your findings once you have a good lead?

At a time when international sanctions affect everything from oil to aircraft parts, this presentation offers insights into investigating sanctioned goods, sharing information on the databases and tools and techniques useful for finding original supply chain stories. We will be drawing on our experience of tracking shipments of aircraft parts from western facilities to Russia via India (see: https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/boeing-airbus-russia-sanctions-aircraft-parts-india-intermediaries). We will explain how we trawled through thousands of transactions to find what we were looking for – and how we turned rows of data into actual stories.

Russian gangsters, fake counts, golden Ferraris and shell companies in Liechtenstein and Switzerland. Investigating the JuicyFields case meant plunging into a wild maze of deception, false leads and spectacular turns. Hundreds of thousands of people were deceived by a group of serial scammers. They claimed everybody could become rich by investing in virtual cannabis. With losses amounting to more than half a billion dollars, the JuicyFields scam is one of the largest pyramid schemes ever investigated by European authorities. Gabriela Keller (Correctiv) and Elisa Simantke (Paper Trail Media) were part of an international team of journalists that uncovered how a bunch of criminals from Russia went on digital raids targeting Europeans again and again. In this panel, Gabriele and Eilsa will explain how they built up sources, what they learnt from OSINT and police documents, how they tracked the path of the criminals from St.Petersburg to Berlin, Switzerland and South America. They will also talk about how they analysed company structures – and learned how to avoid the traps set for them by the criminals. Because, as the investigation built up momentum, the fraudsters were trying to lure the reporters into their network of illusions. And while the JuicyFields website is now defunct, the masterminds behind it are setting up new scams. The business of the fraudsters continues in several countries – as is the international investigation. That means reporters can still learn how to carry on investigating in their own country.

Prompted by nearly 2 TB of leaked data, a recent collaborative investigation co-run by OCCRP and SVT shed unprecedented light on the inner workings and processes of two major scam call centre networks that conned victims out of at least US$275 million over four years. This session will cover how we approached this leak, which included millions of multilingual audio and video media, among other data formats, and how we made it possible for journalists to search that data like any trove of documents.

Journalists should walk away with a better understanding of the challenges and breakthroughs of modern leaks and the methodologies and tools media organizations can employ today in investigations.

Chemical, pesticide and food companies use refined strategies, abusing scientific channels, to manufacture or maintain doubt about the hazards of their products. They hire academic scientists or consultants with a science degree working for product-defence companies to science-wash their lobbying material by publishing articles in peer-reviewed journals. Learn how to investigate them and, in the process, benefit from expert knowledge and methodologies to help you through your investigation.

For the past decade, EU countries have been falling over themselves to prosecute suspected Syrian war criminals hiding in Europe, relying on ‘Universal Jurisdiction’ laws. Among the most prevalent are Germany, France and Spain.

Globally, there are dozens of organisations that claim to hunt down former regime agents, ISIS fighters, and military officials accused of committing serious war crimes before slipping into Europe. These organisations raise millions in government funding and garner significant praise from the world's media.

Behind the scenes, however, we find an untransparent, shadowy alliance between police, prosecutors, and intelligence, with some NGOs blurring the lines between activism and policing. The result is an enthusiastic but deeply flawed application of universal jurisdiction, with a growing trail of ill-fated prosecutions built on flimsy evidence and unreliable witnesses. These have been collected by inexperienced investigators with questionable procedures – and much of this activity is hidden from public view.

There are currently around 120 universal jurisdiction cases across Europe. The fall of the Syrian regime in December 2024 will only increase the need to understand the intricacies of war crimes cases and how to report on prosecutions in Europe.

This session proposes to provide journalists with the tools and prompts to examine cases in their own countries critically. We will tell the journalists exactly how to do this, how to find information and sources, and how to avoid traps, not be drawn in by PR, but to see and assess evidence for what it is.

Europe's pharmaceutical industry is notoriously opaque – and powerful. Big Pharma doesn't want us to know how they determine the prices of the medicines they market, where they store their profits or to whom they hand out millions in funding. The Investigate Europe's investigation Deadly Prices revealed that millions of Europeans lack access to medicines that save or prolong lives in other European countries, and in six EU countries one in four of 32 important medicines analysed is missing, often because they are priced out of reach. This presentation will share tips and techniques on how to investigate Big Pharma – and be transparent about what still remains hidden. From using company and national data that can reveal the true costs of critical medicines to finding public disclosure data that shows who and where the industry's millions go, we will help you with ideas and case studies on how to scrutinise Europe's secretive pharmaceutical world.

The Church is one of the most important players in the European property market, yet it remains to be an opaque institution hard to investigate. Our collaborative project Sacred Grounds is the first one that brings a comprehensive picture on valuable assets the Church owns across European cities and its investment strategies impacting the shape of our cities
For six months, we have cooperated across European media outlets to find out: Do the Churches manage their land holdings in the spirit of Christianity, in the service of the common good and in accordance with their own ethical codes? And what is the impact of church property dealings on the affordability of housing or public services? The coordinators of the Urban Journalism Network investigation will showcase major international and local findings, explain how to get data and how to investigate the non-transparent institution as the Church is.