Süddeutsche Zeitung Became the Go-To Place for Leaks Like the Paradise Papers
How a German Newspaper Became the Go-To Place for Leaks Like the Paradise Papers
Earlier this week, Bastian Obermayer, a reporter for the German
newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, showed me into his “war room,” on the
twenty-fourth floor of the paper’s office tower, in Munich. As I
entered, he instructed me that I was not allowed to take any
photographs. In the center of the room was a cluster of desktop and
laptop computers; beyond them, floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto
the dollhouse city. Whiteboards hanging on the room’s walls were covered
in complicated-looking diagrams. The computers had never been connected
to the Internet, so that they could be used to securely store the 13.4
million files—1.4 terabytes of data—that were leaked last year to
Obermayer and his colleague Frederik Obermaier and that have come to be
known as the Paradise Papers. In coördination with the International
Consortium of Investigative Journalists, three hundred and eighty-one
journalists in sixty-seven countries had worked with the leaked
information, much of which originated at the Bermuda law firm Appleby,
to report stories on how wealthy individuals and companies use offshore
accounts to make their fortunes untraceable and unreachable. Those
stories began to appear in news outlets around the world this week. At
Süddeutsche Zeitung, ten reporters had been dedicated to the project.
They had worked in secret since the leaked documents arrived, keeping
the topic of their investigation even from other journalists who worked
on their floor. “We were always going to get lunch very early,”
Mauritius Much, one of the reporters, told me. “We were going at 11:30 A.M., and everyone was thinking, what the hell are these guys doing?”
Obermayer added, “This is very German.”In landing the Paradise Papers, Obermayer and Obermaier (they are not
related) were the recipients of one of the largest document dumps in
history, second only to Obermayer’s previous career highlight: the
Panama Papers, leaked from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca,
which he received in 2015. In the war room, Obermayer showed me the
database that the I.C.I.J. had developed to sift through large numbers
of files. Its interface looked like Microsoft Outlook, with a search bar
at the top. To give me an example of how it worked, Obermayer typed in
“Trump”—fourteen hundred and sixty-four hits came up, every document in
the cache that mentioned the current U.S. President’s name. On another
screen, Obermayer opened iHub, the encrypted Facebook-like forum that
the I.C.I.J. created to make collaboration easier across borders and
time zones. Journalists working on the Paradise Papers had used iHub,
for example, to coördinate research into Nike’s byzantine
international registration
arrangements.
“Everybody went shopping,” Obermayer’s colleague Elisabeth Gamperl told
me. Reporters in more than half a dozen European countries went out and bought
Nike shoes. Using the tax identification numbers on the different
receipts, and the information gleaned from the leaked documents, they
were able to determine that sales revenues were not staying in the
country where the shoes were purchased but, rather, being funneled to
the Netherlands, which has become one of Europe’s tax havens.I had come to Munich to ask Obermayer how he and his newspaper had found
themselves the recipients of these historic leaks, and at the center of
this enormous, years-long effort to investigate international financial
dealings. Obermayer, who has a long, slender face and wears thick-rimmed
black glasses, told me that he was still new to investigative reporting
in 2012, when Süddeutsche Zeitung decided to join in the I.C.I.J.’s
Offshore Leaks project, the first in a series of reporting projects that
paved the way for the Panama Papers and now the Paradise Papers.
Obermayer, a former magazine writer, had been moved over to the
investigative unit to help improve the team’s writing. While examining
the data on that first project, Obermayer came across the name Mossack
Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm co-founded by the Bavarian-born lawyer
Jürgen Mossack, who moved to Panama in the early nineteen-sixties with
his father, who had served in the Waffen S.S.Obermayer told me that his source for the Panama Papers, whom he refers
to as John Doe, had tried to get the attention of several large
international outlets, including a U.S. paper, before he got in touch
with him. “The leaker didn’t say, ‘Here’s the biggest leak in history,
are you interested?’ ” Obermayer said. The first documents that John Doe
offered him were not journalistically compelling, at first glance. But
Obermayer recognized that they had come from Mossack Fonseca, which he
knew operated in extreme secrecy. “I thought, If somebody has obtained
data from inside Mossack Fonseca, this could be really interesting,” he
said. Knowing the implications of the firm’s name, Obermayer speculated,
may have been why he ended up with the Panama Papers.Süddeutsche Zeitung has, in recent years, pulled even with, or perhaps
surpassed, the Frankfurter Allgemeine as the daily newspaper of
record in Germany. Its home town, Munich, is a wealthy and politically
powerful business hub, with the headquarters of giant corporations such as
Siemens, BMW, and Allianz. The paper, a left-of-center institution in
conservative Bavaria, traces its origins to the aftermath of the Second
World War. Following the war, Allied forces dissolved all existing
newspapers in Germany. A group of German journalists, some of whom had
worked in opposition to the Nazi Party, received the first printing
license issued by the U.S. military’s Munich press office. As the story
goes, the same printing press that had been used to print “Mein Kampf,”
whose publisher was based in Munich, was melted down and reconfigured,
and then used to print the first issue of Süddeutsche Zeitung, on
October 6, 1945.“This is the spirit of this newspaper,” Wolfgang Krach, Süddeutsche
Zeitung’s editor-in-chief, told me. “It has to do with the
self-consciousness and the attitude of the people here.” Krach, a former
investigative reporter with the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, has
brought a commitment to investigative work to his current job. After
publishing the Panama Papers, in 2016, Krach declared Der Spiegel’s monopoly on investigative journalism in Germany over. Part of this push,
he said, arose from the need to secure the future of the paper. “The
only strategy to survive in the long run in this very complicated and
economically difficult environment is that we have to differentiate
ourselves from others, so that people can find in our newspaper
something they cannot find anywhere else,” Krach said. After the Panama
Papers stories were published, Krach said he received phone calls from
editors of major American newspapers, asking not to be left out of the
next big leak. “We have been covering globalization and the problems of
globalization for twenty years now,” Krach told me. “And we haven’t
found an adequate journalistic answer to deal with global issues.” The
Panama Papers, he argued, had been the first true global journalism
project.The Panama and Paradise Papers have brought Obermayer
renown—and a Pulitzer Prize. The work, he said, was exhilarating. “You
get addicted very fast,” he told me. “You can’t let go.” During the two
years he’d worked on both projects he tried not to let them interfere
with normal life—“I didn’t want to get a divorce,” he said—but late at
night, after his wife and children were in bed, he’d often find himself
back at his computer, sifting through documents. “Hanging out in the
data,” he and Obermaier called it. Obermayer spoke about some of the
criticism levelled against the Panama Papers—including the arguments
that, because the first leak hadn’t contained revelations about major
American figures, the documents must have been fake, or some kind of
conspiracy. “This time, with the Paradise Papers, we were so happy when
we found many U.S. names,” Obermayer said. “Because we knew, O.K, we
won’t be accused of working for the C.I.A. Now they say K.G.B. Which is
fine.” U.S. intelligence agencies issued a
report stating that Vladimir Putin believed the Panama Papers were an attack
against Russia—and suggesting that Russia’s meddling in last year’s U.S.
Presidential election may have been a form of retaliation. “When you see
the New York Times writing that this thing that started in your living
room led to Donald Trump, then you don’t know what to think about it,”
Obermayer said, pausing to find the right words. “I mean, I don’t think
it’s true. But for a moment, if you read it, it’s just out of control.
You know this thing that you started, you cannot take it back.”