Gerard Ryle

It all begins with a revolutionary pill that you dissolve in the tank of your car, which was supposed to reduce fuel consumption and cut exhaust emissions to zero. It set off a gold rush. The Australian company that claimed to market it raised more than 100 million dollars. The scam was exposed by the Australian investigative journalist, Gerard Ryle. During his investigation he ran into the tax haven secrecy of the British Virgin Islands. At the time, he did not realize that he would be the one to break the secrecy. Soon after the results of his work were published, in summer 2011, the journalist received a mysterious package. It contained a hard disk containing 2.5 million files going back some 30 years and tracking the histories of offshore accounts of nearly 130,000 people living in 170 countries. It was a huge quantity of data, 170 times bigger than the release by WikiLeaks of diplomatic cables, known as Cablegate, Two years later, in 2013, Offshore Leaks was finally published, sending political shockwaves around the world. The investigation was the result of a joint effort by journalists working in 46 different countries, coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigate Journalists which Lyle heads. Today he is the driving force behind a type of journalism that crosses borders and language barriers, and he embodies the future of investigative journalism worldwide.