Guardian Award Winner Takes Corruption Fight to Highest Levels

When Miranda Patrucic first started out as an investigative journalist, her editor Drew Sullivan would tell her, “Go get me a miracle.” Patrucic never quite understood but she was soon to discover what he meant after being assigned to do a profile of Milo Dukanovic, the longstanding leader of the small Balkan nation Montenegro.

“I didn’t know anything about Montenegro, and [here I was] deciding to go investigate a prime minister, the most powerful person in the country,” recalled Patrucic to another packed opening session at the 34th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference in Seattle on Tuesday.

While local gossip about Dukanovic’s substantial wealth was common, there was no real evidence that such talk was true. Looking through the property registries seemed like an obvious starting point, but Patrucic needed the politician’s national insurance number, which she didn’t have. So, a determined Patrucic took the arduous route instead. She went through the registry street by street, building by building, until one night at 3 a.m. she stumbled upon a property owned by Dukanovic. She excitedly called Sullivan, who said, “You got your miracle.”

Patrucic and other reporters eventually found that Dukanovic — who’d held power in the small Balkan country either as prime minister or president since the 1990s — owned or controlled properties or shares in companies worth $14.7 million, which stood in sharp contrast to his monthly salary of $1,700.

That story was Patrucic’s first big scoop, and it put her on the map. Since then, Patrucic has broken stories galore about corruption across the globe and was recently promoted to the position of editor-in-chief of Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) — a global network of investigative journalists focused on organized crime and corruption co-founded by Sullivan. She is also the recipient of the ACFE Guardian Award, which is bestowed on someone whose determination, perseverance and commitment to the truth has contributed significantly to the fight against fraud.

Patrucic’s determination has made all the difference in uncovering the truth about fraud and corruption. Shortly after exposing Dukanovic’s illicit wealth, she went on the hunt for information about a bank owned by his family. The Dukanovic administration had bailed out the bank in 2008 during the global financial crisis and it was thought to be vehicle for loans to family and friends. An allusive PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) audit was nowhere to be found. “I would ask reporters and they would tell me, ‘Just forget about it. You will never get it,” said Patrucic.

Three years later, Patrucic asked the same question to a source, and they handed her piles of documents showing evidence of money laundering and the opening of accounts for drug lords. That clinched Patrucic another high-profile story about Dukanovic.

Patrucic soon become known as the go-to person for such stories and one day she received a call from Swedish journalists who wanted to know who was behind a $320 million 3G licensing deal that the country’s telecom giant TeliaSonera had signed in Uzbekistan. “I had no idea,” laughs Patrucic. “But we ended up proving it was Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of the president,” who was taking bribes in exchange for contracts.

A native of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Patrucic said that her life often seems like a movie as she exposes billions of dollars in corruption across the planet. “I sometimes even joke that if they didn’t steal a billion, don’t even call me,” she laughs.

But the life of an investigative reporter also brings its own unique dangers, which Patrucic was not always aware of. She recalls how she asked her editor why someone in Montenegro was asking her how much her life was worth, not realizing that it was a death threat. “He was like ‘Get the hell out of the country,’” she said.

Since then, a former MI6 operative has trained Patrucic in counter surveillance and when to know that someone is following her. She also highlighted the need for fraud examiners to share information and their skills with journalists in their work to uncover corruption. “We also need people to care about our work, and this is why this award is meaningful because I am much safer now with this kind of recognition,” she said.

Having grown up during the brutal civil war in Bosnia in the 1990s, Patrucic is no stranger to such dangers. “My war years really shaped me into who I am today and why I care so much about corruption,” she said.

“[During the war] one thing that mattered was to tell what was going on because unless you were in the country nobody knew. So why do I expose corruption even if nothing happens? I expose it so nobody can say we didn’t know. Everything is now online so you just choose not to know.”