For Money Laundering To Occur, All That Authorities Have To Do Is Nothing

In this conversation with RevDem editor Robert Nemeth, Dean Starkman and Neil Weinberg (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists) talk about Cyprus Confidential, the investigation exposing how Cyprus-based financial services firms have enabled the Russian elite— including Vladimir Putin’s inner circle — to shelter their wealth and shield billions of dollars in assets from the threat of impending sanctions. They explain how this system worked and what enabled it, but also share insights into how journalists work on cross-border collaborative projects on such scale.

Dean Starkman is a senior editor for ICIJ, a Fellow of the CEU Democracy Institute, and a visiting lecturer at the School of Public Policy at the Central European University. He is the author of The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism, an acclaimed analysis of business-press failures prior to the 2008 financial crisis and theoretical framework for journalism’s past, present, and future. An investigative reporter for more than two decades, he covered white-collar crime and national real estate for The Wall Street Journal and helped lead the Providence Journal’s investigative team to a Pulitzer Prize in 1994.

Neil Weinberg is a senior reporter for ICIJ. He has more than three decades' experience in journalism, including most recently as a business and finance reporter at Bloomberg. He served as editor-in-chief of trade publication American Banker from 2011 to 2014, and prior to that was a journalist with the Forbes Media Group for almost 20 years, first as a reporter before becoming a bureau chief and, ultimately, executive editor.