TRACE Foundation Announces Recipients of the 2022 TRACE Prize for Investigative Reporting

TRACE Foundation Announces 2022 Prize for Investigative Reporting Winners

ANNAPOLIS, Md., June 24, 2022 -- The TRACE Foundation, a non-profit organization established to support projects that encourage greater commercial transparency, today announced the winners of the 2022 TRACE Prize for Investigative Reporting. The annual award recognizes journalism that uncovers business bribery or related financial crime.

Lilia Saúl Rodríguez from Mexico and Luisa García Tellez from Peru won the Prize for leading the investigation “Where Is My Pension?”, a collaboration between 12 media partners.* Their work uncovered the consequences of a decades-long drive to privatize pensions across Latin America: poor returns, excessive fees, opaque transactions and questionable investments.

“Thanks to this recognition, we will be able to ensure that the investigation reaches more people and, at the same time, raise our voices against those who continue to fail to comply with the transparency and access to information to which they are obliged,” Rodríguez said. “And although our project has been carried out in several Latin American countries, it is important to point out the Mexican situation, since journalism in our country has currently been threatened in different ways.”

“We'd love to see a version of 'Where Is My Pension?' in different regions, and let this be just the starting point in Latin America. Citizens deserve to know who they are funding with their retirement savings,” Tellez said.

The second recipient of the 2022 TRACE prize is a cross-border team including Sveriges Television of Sweden, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen of Germany, and Confluence Media of India. Their reporting documented a double standard that allowed a host of unethical and possibly illegal practices to flourish at the India operations of Swedish company Scania.

“This work would not have been possible without the cooperation between journalists from Sweden, India and Germany. It’s easier to understand and investigate the culture of multinational corporations if you also organize your journalism multinationally,” SVT editor Hans Peterson Hammer said.

An honorable mention went to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Reuters, the Times of Malta and Suddeutsche Zeitung for their investigation “Trail of Murdered Journalist’s Reporting Leads from Malta to China,” carried out as part of The Daphne Project led by Forbidden Stories.

A second honorable mention went to Zack Kopplin of the Government Accountability Project and Margaux Benn of Le Figaro for their investigation “How Afghanistan’s President Helped His Brother and a U.S. Contractor Secure a Lucrative Mineral Processing Permit,” published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

“Journalism remains the absolute bedrock of democratic ideals,” TRACE President Alexandra Wrage said. “Our actions—or failure to act—will define our response to the global battle between democracy and autocracy. That’s why it’s so critical to continue to support and fund high quality, independent journalism.”

The judging panel for the 2022 TRACE Prize for Investigative Reporting included William Gumede, Diana B. Henriques, Rosebell Kagumire, Peter Klein, Donatella Lorch, Jorge Luis Sierra and Amjad Tadros.

The TRACE Foundation will begin accepting submissions for the 2023 TRACE Prize for Investigative Reporting in the fall of 2022. For more details, visit traceinternational.org/investigative-reporting.

*“Where Is My Pension?” Media partners included Cuestión Pública, La Pública, Poder, Aristegui, Interferencia de Radios UCR, La Voz de Guanacaste, Distintas Latitudes, Concolón, Sudestada, El Economista, Sudaca and Expansión.

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.org/tracefoundation.