The Guardian has won a prestigious international journalism prize for its work identifying assets owned by Russian oligarchs.
Russian Asset Tracker, a collaborative project led by the Guardian and the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, won the Innovation award at the European Press Prize in a ceremony held in Tbilisi, Georgia, on Friday.
The project involved more than 100 journalists from media organisations across the world, including Le Monde in France, Miami Herald in the US and NDR in Germany.
The Guardian’s Juliette Garside, Simon Goodley, Kalyeena Makortoff, Jasper Jolly, Pamela Duncan, David Blood, Niamh McIntyre and Rob Davies all worked on the investigation.
In the wake of Russia’s brutal assault on Ukraine, governments around the world imposed sanctions on many of President Vladimir Putin’s enablers. The investigation tracked down as many of these assets as possible, and compiled them in the Russian Asset Tracker database for the public to see and use.
More than $17bn (£13bn) of global assets – including offshore bank accounts, yachts, private jets and luxury properties in London, Tuscany and the French Riviera – were linked to 35 oligarchs and Russian officials alleged to have close ties to Putin.
The assets included a £250m UK property collection amassed by the former Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich, while the project also uncovered how Alisher Usmanov, the Russian oligarch once said to be the UK’s richest person, claimed to have placed hundreds of millions of pounds of his assets into an irrevocable trust, potentially leaving them outside western governments’ sanctions regimes.
The investigation was published in March 2022, less than a month after Russia invaded Ukraine.
The European Press Prize judges said the work of tracking the assets of oligarchs was “important”, and they praised the presentation and transparency of the reporting, adding: “It is very relevant, it is a story that we need now.”
