Crude Lies is the result of over two years of investigation by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) into Ecopetrol, the Colombian state-owned oil company. The findings and the internal database associated with them, hereafter referred to as the Iguana Papers, offer a rare look into “business as usual” for the largest corporation in Colombia.

EIA’s investigation was triggered by an email received from Andrés Olarte Peña in September 2021, linking to a series of folders and files. The Iguana Papers were developed from this material. Most of these files were created or updated between January 2017 and January 2019, during the time Olarte worked at Ecopetrol, based in the Bogota corporate headquarters. Olarte’s decision to blow the whistle against the most powerful company in his home country opened the door for a “too big to fail” company to be caught failing.

Read the report by Environmental Investigation Agency

Read the BBC investigation here

What we did

We provided a temporarily and seperate public OpenAleph instance for EIA optimized for high load during the publication phase. This included extra security and caching layers as well a failover replica in another datacenter.

The Library of Leaks is a project of Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), a non-profit that specializes in publishing, archiving and analyzing leaked and hacked datasets. The Library of Leaks is the world's largest public collection of previously secret information.

What it is about?

An investigation by The BMJ shows the extent of the fossil fuel industry’s involvement in medical research, leading to fresh calls for academics and publishing companies to cut ties with such companies.

Over the past six years more than 180 articles in medical publications or medical articles in other publications have acknowledged funding by the fossil fuel industry, and an additional 1000 articles have authors who worked for a fossil fuel company or related organisation, The BMJ’s analysis found.

How we contributed

This research is part of our project FollowTheGrant, for which we maintain a database of scientific publications, their authors and institutions, and potential conflict of interests. In this analysis we cross-referenced fossil fuel companies with the funding information and acknowledgements within medical articles, and investigated the relations between affiliated research organizations and industry players.

What it is about?

Gas suppliers across Germany are advertising "climate-neutral natural gas" - but they are not keeping their promises, as CORRECTIV now reveals. Supposedly protected forests are being cut down and even gas-fired power plants are being expanded. How companies are deceiving hundreds of thousands of customers and fueling the climate crisis.

How we contributed

We cross-referenced the German Marktstammdatenregister with the emission compensation projects databases of VERRA and Gold Standard using our followthemoney data engineering stack.

What it is about?

An organization called the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) has been investigated for their involvement with Europe’s discriminatory, racist, and human rights violating migration policies. It has been revealed that it directly and indirectly influences European migration policy, and, as shown in the research, supports and proposes the tightening of asylum laws. This seemingly invisible organization has orchestrated some of the most abhorrent strategies for migrant border control, asylum seeker detainment and deportation, refugee monitoring within Europe, oppression of journalism activity, and more.

How we contributed

We’ve obtained leaked documents and promptly ingested them into a dedicated Aleph instance making these documents researchable and accessible to the investigative team.

What it is about

This investigative reporting broadcast special focuses on who the International centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) is, their influence ties to German politicians, their hand in migration policies currently being developed in Germany (particularly in Bavaria), what they’ve been involved with and the effects of these projects in and beyond Europe. Think of John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” but in German.

How we contributed

We’ve obtained leaked documents and promptly ingested them into a dedicated Aleph instance making these documents researchable and accessible to the investigative team.

What it is about

This project explores ways that the European Union carries out border control projects that known to be extremly violent, dehumanizing, and excessive without taking responsibility or accountability. It uncovers the tactics such as partnering with the organization called the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) known for its involvement with such cruel and opaque practices and other third party organizations.

How we contributed

We’ve obtained leaked documents and promptly ingested them into a dedicated Aleph instance making these documents researchable and accessible to the investigative team.

What is it about?

This project aims to obtain and share detailed data relating to the payments and recipients of farm subsidies in every EU member State, so European citizens can rest assured their tax money ends in the right hands. But it’s so much more than just subsidies because they also influence everything from food prices, environmental policies, rural economies, biodiversity, to climate change mitigation in Europe, and more. Therefore, the system is inequitable and complex, making it difficult for farmers to navigate.

In cooperation with WDR, NDR, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Correctiv, Der Standard, IrpiMedia, Reporter.lu, Reporters United, Expresso, Follow The Money and Gazeta Wyborcza, FragDenStaat analysed the data and published stories jointly. Farmsubsidy.org is run by FragDenStaat, the central contact for all questions relating to freedom of information in Germany.

How we contributed

For this project, we provided an extensive data engineering service where we provided everything from scraping all the national data sources to cleaning the data and making it comparable and analyzable. We built the api and website for the exploration tool that you see now. Additionally, we transform the data into the FollowTheMoney standard to make it searchable in Aleph.

What it is about?

Every year, judges and public prosecutors distribute millions of euros from discontinued criminal proceedings. They are free to decide which associations receive money. However, the lack of transparency has been criticized for years. Around 50,000 funded organizations can now be searched in an updated CORRECTIV database.

How we contributed

We provided an extensive data engineering solution to effectively clean the data and transform it to the FollowTheMoney standard, de-duplicate entities within the data, and making it accessible and searchable for team use. Finally, we also built the api and website for the public to access the exploration tool.

What it is about?

Open Security Data Europe is a public platform aimed at tracking and displaying how the European Union spends money on security-related projects, including on topics related to policing, border control, counter-terrorism and cybersecurity, as well as weapons and other military equipment. The platform is a tool for journalists, researchers, civil society organizations and others to better understand the growing investments of the European Union in security.

How we contributed

We provided an extensive data engineering solution to effectively clean the data to make it usable in Aleph, de-duplicate and cross-reference entities within the data, and making it accessible and searchable for team use. Finally, we also built the website for the public to access the exploration tool.

What it is about?

Over the past three years, the project has evaluated more than 4.9 million medical articles from 27,000 journals worldwide, including work by around 8.5 million authors. The project database is available for further research.

The project revealed that conflicts of interest are widely under-reported in scientific literature. It identified examples of failure to disclose conflicts of interest and showed which companies are heavily involved in research that has conflicts of interest.

How we contributed

For this project, we provide everything from scraping a diverse range of data sources to cleaning the data, transforming it into the FollowTheMoney standard and making it comparable. We use different methods to de-duplicate entities within the data and operate a custom Aleph database which allows the data to be easily accessible and searchable for external partners.

What it is about

What happens to the millions of shoes we discard every year in Europe? 2.5 billion shoes are produced each year and are eventually thrown away. Sneakerjagd's mission is to shine light over the sneaker industry and fact check the sustainability promises of the manufacturers and recyclers. In order to do this, they bugged eleven pairs of sneakers from German celebrities with GPS trackers, to study the recycling cycle of the shoes and their whereabouts. The project is still ongoing, so check it out!

How we contributed

We created and developed a custom solution for a data pipeline that ultimately allows us to create the data visualization that you see now. This challenge was unique as we had to wrangle and clean up huge amounts of raw satellite data.

What it is about?

Dokukratie aims to be a database for investigative journalists and journalists in general to have access to public legal papers. From small inquiries to big reports, Dokukratie allows for access and download of the different legal documents from the Bundestadt. These are all publicly available documents condensed in a single platform.

How we contributed

We developed and executed a data engineering solution where we scraped from a vast resource of federal-level data and extracted the documents. Upon gathering the documents, we cleaned the data and documents to make it accessible and searchable in Aleph.