TRACE Foundation Announces Recipients of the 2023 TRACE Prize for Investigative Reporting

TRACE Foundation Announces 2023 Prize for Investigative Reporting Winners

ANNAPOLIS, Md., October 10, 2023 -- The TRACE Foundation, a non-profit organization established to support projects that encourage greater commercial transparency, today announced the winners of the 2023 TRACE Prize for Investigative Reporting. The annual award recognizes journalism that uncovers business bribery or related financial crime.

Dewald van Rensburg won the Prize for his impeccably documented and deeply engaging two-part series, “The Laundry,” the first product of an ongoing investigation by the amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism. These stories take readers deep inside the money-laundering industry in South Africa, showing step-by-step how existing banks and key professionals form the building blocks of an informal banking sector that facilitates large-scale crime and secretly moves staggering amounts of money offshore.

"This award goes a long way towards shining a light not only on this investigation, but also the micro-mechanics of illicit financial flows in the Southern African region - a scourge that facilitates corruption and many other predicate crimes,” said Dewald van Rensburg. “South Africa is fast becoming an important hub for transnational financial crime and the TRACE Prize will undoubtedly help establish it as a priority focus area for myself and other journalists."

The second recipient of the 2023 TRACE prize is a team of journalists from Mongabay, BBC and The Gecko Project. Their joint investigation, published in various installments throughout the three news outlets, focuses on how Indonesian communities, whose traditional agricultural life has been upended by large-scale palm oil production, have been systematically cheated by corporations that promised – and in many cases, that were legally required – to share a portion of their profits with the villagers whose land made those profits possible. Some of the key outputs from the investigation can be seen here, here and here.

"Our investigation involved months of painstaking work trying to piece together the scale of this problem, while building a picture of the very real human cost. So it feels rewarding that that effort has been recognised by such a prestigious award,” said Tom Johnson, founder and editor of The Gecko Project. “But we hope that it can also generate further attention to an issue that remains unresolved. Just over the past few weeks, for example, there has been a large ongoing protest in Seruyan district on the island of Borneo, one of the areas we covered in our reporting where local residents have been deprived of plasma." 

An honorable mention went to Jeff Wicks and his investigative team at News24 in South Africa for their investigation “Silenced,” which follows the murder of an anti-corruption whistleblower.

A second honorable mention went toe the Organized Crime & Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) for their work following a single digital footprint “LLCinvest.ru” to expose remarkable links among assets believed to be owned by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Through the TRACE Prize for Investigative Reporting, now in its eighth year, we recognize investigative journalists worldwide who work tirelessly—and often at considerable personal risk—to expose corruption at the highest levels,” TRACE President Alexandra Wrage said. “Investigative journalism faces ongoing challenges from the rise of sophisticated fake content on one hand and increasingly hostile autocratic governments on the other. The stories shared by this year’s winners highlight the destabilizing effects of greed, money-laundering, and corruption.”

This year’s judging panel included William Gumede, Diana B. Henriques, Rosebell Kagumire, Donatella Lorch, Jorge Luis Sierra and Amjad Tadros.

The application for the 2024 TRACE Prize for “Investigative Reporting: Uncovering Commercial Bribery” is now open. You can access the application here. If you have questions, please contact Emma Rathmann at [email protected].

About the TRACE Foundation

The TRACE Foundation was established to promote, support and fund research, investigative journalism, publications, videos and related projects that encourage greater commercial transparency and advance anti-bribery education. For more information, visit TRACEinternational.orgTRACEfoundation.