The consequences of Andrej Babiš’s recent victory in the Czech Republic’s parliamentary elections will be far reaching.
Despite not securing an overall majority, the populist billionaire’s ANO (“Yes”) party has vowed to steer the country on a different course: during the election campaign Babiš promised to end Czech bilateral military aid to Ukraine, spoke against the EU’s climate policies, and criticised its immigration pact.
His victory is also likely to impact the country’s independent media, including Civitates’ new grantee partner, the multi-award winning investigative outlet, investigace.cz. For its editor-in-chief Pavla Holcová and her team, Babiš’s victory has personal resonance.
Holcová and her colleagues’ reporting is widely seen as contributing to Babiš’s surprise defeat in the October 2021 elections.
Five days before that vote took place, investigace.cz revealed that in 2009 Babiš had moved $22 million through a complex offshore structure to buy lavish villas on the French Riviera, while keeping his ownership secret. Their reporting was part of the largest journalism collaboration in history: the Pandora Papers project, which included more than 600 journalists from around the world working on the biggest leak of offshore financial data ever.
One hour after publishing the story, the threats and hate messages against investigace.cz began – and continued to arrive in their hundreds long after Babiš lost. Babiš’s return to power has understandably left Holcová uneasy about what comes next.
“It’s going to be tough. He’s very open about his revenge,” she said, speaking a few days before voting took place, but with Babiš ahead in the polls. “He took it [the exposure of his secret property holdings] very personally.”
During his last term in office between 2017 to 2021 Babiš – who was later forced to relinquish his vast media assets because of a conflict of interest – was accused of subverting press freedom. Since then, with USAID funding cuts, the financial landscape for independent media in the Czech Republic has grown harsher.
But investigace.cz, which specialises in uncovering cross-border organised crime and its impacts on the Czech and Slovak Republics, is well-versed in overcoming challenges, and has been doing so since it was founded in 2013.
Unusual beginnings
Investigace.cz’s origin story is unusual.
Holcová was working for a European humanitarian NGO training journalists in Cuba, with Paul Radu, co-founder of the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), when they were arrested after falling into conversation in a Havana bar with a man who claimed to be breaking the embargo on bringing military equipment into Cuba.
“We [Radu and Holcová] couldn’t discuss Cuban dissidents during our detention, so we discussed his job. He said he was an investigative reporter working on a cross-border project, but that he had difficulties finding journalists in the Czech Republic willing to cooperate. He asked if I could help him find someone.”
When she later couldn’t find anyone, Holcová decided to do it herself: “I quit my job as a human rights defender and founded investigace.cz.” Although Holcová had studied journalism, she says she “needed to learn a lot of things very quickly”. What’s more, she had to do so without financial support.
“At first, investigace.cz didn’t have any money. So I took another job to pay my rent. For three years, I worked for an IT company during the day and worked on hardcore investigations at night. At the same time, I was reading a lot of books on organised crime, financial reports, studies on money laundering, and absorbing as much information as possible.”
Tight security
Investigace.cz was soon producing the kind of stories no other Czech outlet had done before. As the only Czech publication which is part of the international networks of investigative journalists, the OCCRP and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICCJ), they have been involved in some of the biggest global news stories of recent times.
As well as the Pandora Papers, investigace.cz has been instrumental in helping bring to light the revelations contained in the Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers, the Russian Laundromat, and the Azerbaijani Laundromat.
Holcová, who won the ICFJ Knight International Journalism Award in 2021 (among other recognition), has also exposed illegal arms sales to Syria and uncovered the links between Balkan organised crime and the global cocaine trade.
Understanding, dissecting and distilling the enormous amount of data contained in leaks such as the Panama or Pandora Papers, requires painstaking attention to detail, while operating under tight security.
“Imagine a truckload of documents being dropped in the middle of your office, and you have no idea where to start,” Holcová explained. “At the beginning, the Panama Papers was 11 million documents. But slowly, step by step, the databases get sorted and become searchable.”
Plot twists
While undoubtedly of immense public interest, engaging audiences in stories about tangled offshore financial instruments can be a challenge, Holcová said.
One way investigace.cz is overcoming this however, is through its new podcast series, Protagonista, in which reporters recall the often gripping tales behind their investigations.
“[Through the podcast] journalists bring back emotions to the stories they’ve done, explaining how they lived through them, and what they thought at the time. The plot twists, the frustrating moments as well as the fun… How they could not tell their husband or wife what they were doing because of the sensitivity of the documents.”
The Czech Republic’s already beleaguered independent media – operating in an environment in which disinformation and Russian propaganda has reached historic highs – faces an uncertain future.
But Holcová and the investigace.cz team are as clear-eyed as ever about their purpose:
“The official phrase is to hold those in power accountable. But my friend who used to be an investigative reporter in Slovakia nailed it much better. He said, ‘We can’t give it to those f****** for free. We need to fight.’ Also, it’s super interesting to peek into the world of organised crime.”
