Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today we're revisiting the FinZen files.

My guest is Will Fitzgibbon.

He's a senior reporter with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the ICIJ,

where he also coordinates partnerships in Africa and the Middle

East. He's been on several winning and honorable mention teams for the Trace Prize for

investigative reporting. That's Trace's annual award for projects that address commercial

bribery. The FinCEN files investigation, which we're talking about today, was also a 2021 Pulitzer

Prize finalist. Will, thank you for joining me.

It's great to be here. In September 2020, you helped break the fairly breathtaking Finzan

Files story, exposing vast and complicated banking system that moves dirty money around the globe.

And the surprisingly hands-off approach by US-led enforcement,

can you just talk us through the FinCEN-Files investigation, how it started and what you learned?

The FinCENFiles investigation was a collaboration of hundreds of journalists around the world,

as the ICIJ is now used to doing.

And it started with more than 2,000 suspicious activity reports obtained by BuzzFeed News,

who shared those documents with ICIJ.

And ICIJ, for the readers and listeners out there who are familiar with us, know that what we do is assemble teams of journalists from around the world. Because these 2,000 or 2,100 suspicious

activity reports included potentially suspicious financial flows from every country on the planet

that you could imagine. So it makes sense,

doesn't it, that a journalist in Tanzania will recognize the important value of a transaction

from Tanzania, whereas someone like me sitting in Washington, D.C. might not be able to recognize

...