Beata Biel

Beata Biel is an award winning, Krakow-based Polish journalist, documentarian and TV producer. For the past 10 years she has worked as a researcher and reporter for the Polish TV channel TVN. As a reporter and investigative journalist, she has focused on current affairs, social issues, human stories, human rights and terrorism. Since September 2010, she has been working as a freelancer and running her own production company. In 2008 she won the Polish Grand Press Award for the best TV reporting of the year for her film “Help in Death” about a Swiss organization Dignitas, which helps people commit suicide. A year later she won a special mention during the TV Investigative Reports Review for her documentary film “The Terrorists’ Prince” about the Polish relations with Arab terrorists in the 70s and 80s. She is a 2011 Transatlantic Media Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. She received an M.A. in journalism and mass communications from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

Tamás Bodoky

Tamás Bodoky is a freelance investigative journalist based in Budapest, Hungary. He has written about science, technology, the environment, human rights issues, corruption, organized crime cases, police brutality, and green politics. Before joining Index.hu, where he works as a journalist and editor, he was a science and technology journalist at the Magyar Narancs weekly. He is editor of Hungarian media studies quarterly Médiakutató, and teaches journalism at Károli Gáspár University in Budapest. In July 2011 Bodoky co-founded a watchdog NGO and news portal for investigative journalism, atlatszo.hu, where he serves as editor in chief and managing director. He has won the G?bölyös Soma Prize for investigative journalism in 2008, and the Szabadság Prize in 2009 for his articles on Hungary’s 2006 unrest and police brutality. He has also won the Iustitia Regnorum Fundamentum and the Hungarian Pulitzer Memorial Prize for his investigative articles on corruption cases. He received an MS.c. degree in Agricultural Sciences and a Ph.D. degree in Language Sciences.

Aleksandar Bozhinovski

Aleksandar Bozhinovski, based in Macedonia, is an investigative journalist for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. He began as a court reporter before becoming an investigative reporter covering terrorism, the police and the military, corruption, and organized crime. He has written about game fixing in sports, eavesdropping in Macedonia, and the interference of foreign spy agencies in the Balkans. He has worked as a journalist since 1996 for the daily Vecer, Nova Makedonija, the daily Vreme, and for the weekly Forum. He broke the story on an extraordinary rendition case, tracking the abduction of Khaled el-Masri. For the story, he worked in cooperation with The New York Times and a number of German news organizations including ZDF-TV. He received his degree from the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje in Macedonia.

Milorad Ivanovic

Milorad Ivanovic is the executive editor of Novi Magazin, a Serbian newsweekly. He previously served as deputy editor in chief and executive editor of Blic, the biggest Serbian daily. He has worked as a correspondent for the French news agency EPN, and has written about the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, social media, terrorism, trauma reporting, human rights, and corruption in international newspapers including El Mundo (Spain), The Mail on Sunday (UK), The Sunday Times (UK), The Washington Times (USA), and Der Standard (Austria). He is a board member of SCOOP, the network of investigative journalists in East and Southeastern Europe and has taken part in several cross-border projects, including a six-month investigation on arms trafficking from Ukraine via Bulgaria to Serbia. His investigation on mercenaries from the Balkans working for British and US security firms in Iraq was published extensively in the international media. In 2007 he was selected for the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence. He studied at the School of Defence in the University of Belgrade.

Sasa Lekovic

Sasa Lekovic is a Croatian journalist who is the director of the Investigative Journalism Center (IJC) in Zagreb, Croatia. He has written about organized crime, human trafficking, corruption, and war. He lectures on investigative reporting at Singidunum University in Belgrade, Serbia and is a co-founder and trainer in the Media Training Center at FMC (FMC, IJC Belgrade, IJC Zagreb). He has worked as an investigative reporter, executive editor, and assistant editor in chief for, respectively, Globus, a Croatian national news magazine, Arena, a Croatian national weekly, and Jutarnji List, a Croatian national daily. He also worked with the B92 media company based in Belgrade as an author and editor of the SEARCH – MISSING PERSONS regional web, TV, and radio project. He is a member of the Croatian Journalists’ Association, the International Federation of Journalists, and the Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc., USA. He is a recipient of the Croatian Journalists´ Association 2000 Investigative Reporting Prize (print media). He received his training from an investigative reporting TOT (training of trainers) conducted by the South-East European Network for Professionalization of Media and the Danish School of Journalism.

Adrian Mogos

Adrian Mogos, a native of Cluj, currently works for the Romanian daily Jurnalul National and at the Romanian Center for Investigative Journalism. He has published numerous investigative reports on Romanian media, and also worked on several regional investigative projects. His investigations include: Forged Identity – Highway to EU, which appeared in the Jurnalul National in 2009, and he was the lead coordinator of “The Fields of Terror – the New Slave Trade in the Heart of Europe,” a cross-border investigation about forced labor networks still active in Western European countries. He has produced many other investigative pieces on such topics as illegal deforestations in Romania, suspicious public tenders organized by the local authorities, and the abuse of Roma children. He was a 2009 Fellow in the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence program. He received his B.A. in journalism and English from the West University of Timisoara and studied at the Academia Istropolitan Nova in Slovakia.

Paul Radu

Paul Radu is co-founder and chief of innovation at the Overseas Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. He leads OCCRP’s major investigative projects, scopes regional expansion, and develops new strategies and technology to expose organized crime and corruption across borders. Paul initiated and led the award-winning Russian, Azerbaijani, and Troika Laundromat investigations, and coined the term “laundromat” to define large scale, all-purpose financial fraud vehicles that are used to launder billions of dollars. He is a co-creator of Investigative Dashboard — a research desk that sifts through datasets to help journalists trace people, companies, and assets — and the Visual Investigative Scenarios software, a tool that lets reporters sketch out the people, institutions, and connections in criminal networks so people can easily follow complex investigations. He is also a co-founder of RISE Project, a platform for investigative reporters in Romania. Read more of Paul’s bio here.

Stanimir Vaglenov

Stanimir Vaglenov, a native of Stara Zagora, Bulgaria, is a journalist specializing in economic and energy reporting. He is currently chief of the Department of Informational and Internet services in the Newspaper Group, Bulgaria. He has also worked at the dailies 24 Hours and Continent and Business Post weekly. He has written at length about the social, economic and political implications of the South Stream pipeline, one of the most controversial energy projects in Europe. For the project, he worked closely with Albena Shkodrova, an editor of BIRN’s Balkan Insight publication. He studied journalism and publishing at Veliko Turnovo University.

Blaz Zgaga

Blaz Zgaga is a freelance journalist in Slovenia and one of the co-authors of the three-part investigative trilogy “In the Name of the State,” which focuses on arms smuggling into the Balkans during the conflicts of the 1990s. He has written extensively about arms trafficking, intellgience, and the politics of security and defense. His work has appeared in Slovenia’s main daily newspapers Delo and Vecer, and in The Guardian, The Observer, Jane’s Defence Weekly, Jane’s Intelligence Review. Zgaga’s work has led to investigations by the Slovene police, and he was prosecuted by the Slovene State Prosecutor for revealing military secrets and disclosing intelligence cooperation between Slovene and US intelligence services (DIA) against former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. With co-author Matej Surc, he received a CEI/SEEMO special diploma for investigative journalism in November 2011 for their first book of a trilogy about arms smuggling. He received his B.A. in Sociology at the University of Ljubljana.