Category: Trainers and panelists

He started his career reporting for the Florida Times Union in Jacksonville, Florida.

He moved to Albania in 2005 where he has been a features editor for the Tirana Times, a world news editor for the 24 hour news channel, TV Ora News, and since 2007 as BIRN Albania editor.

He has also contributed stories to various publications such as The Christian Science Monitor, Global Post, Transitions Online and World Politics Review.

In 2009 Likmeta received the CEI/SEEMO Award for Outstanding Merits in Investigative Journalism and in 2010 was runner up to the Global Shining Light Award, presented at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva. 

http://birn.eu.com/en/1/110/

He is one of the founder members of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists a non-profit reporters’ group headquartered in Washington DC. The ICIJ recently received worldwide prominence for its exposure of the secret ownership of thousands of offshore companies, now the subject of an unprecedented tax evasion investigation by authorities in the US, UK and Australia.

His previous work included a key role in the analysis and publication in 2010 of leaked US military and diplomatic data from Wikileaks, which also caused worldwide uproar. Other cross-border collaborations he has handled in recent years included the exposure of toxic waste-dumping in Africa by the oil traders Trafigura, and a pioneering series documenting tax avoidance by large multi-national companies.

He has won numerous awards in a 40-year career which has spanned Britain’s most famous TV programmes and newspapers. A government minister, Jonathan Aitken, went to jail as a result of a film Leigh made about his arms dealing,  for the British TV series “World in Action”. Britain’s biggest arms company, BAe Systems, was fined in excess of $300m by the US department of justice, following a 7-year campaign by Leigh in the “Guardian” to expose its network of corrupt payments all over the world.

His books include “Wikileaks: inside Julian Assange’s war on secrecy”; “High Time”, a biography of international cannabis smuggler Howard Marks; and “The Wilson Plot”, a study of misconduct by Western intelligence agencies.

Between 2004 and 2005, he wrote investigative stories for a weekly paper also based in Iasi. The paper, “Ieseanul”, is part of a national network owned by the media group Media Pro.

In 2005, Prisacariu became a investigative reporter for the national daily “Evenimentul Zilei”, based in Bucharest and owned by the Swiss media group Ringier. He moved to the national weekly “Academia Catavencu” in 2006 as head of the investigative department. “Academia Catavencu” is owned by businessman Sorin Ovidiu Vintu, who also owns several papers, two radio stations and a TV station.

In March 2010, Prisacariu decided to resign because of the owner’s repeated acts of censorship; he then started, together with several colleagues from “Academia Catavencu”, a new weekly paper. He is now a deputy editor-in-chief for this new national weekly, “Kamikaze”.

Catalin Prisacariu is a member of the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism (www.crji.org), a non-governmental organization established by investigative journalists. Prisacariu is involved in many projects run by the centre, covering stories about human trafficking, corruption, organized crime, and other topics.

Prisacariu has also worked for papers and TV stations based in other European countries (Financial Times, ARD, ZDF, Television Suisse Romande).

http://www.crji.org

She is currently working on a major investigation into corruption in Fifa and the Qatar 2022 World Cup bid based on a cache of hundreds of millions of leaked documents which made headlines around the world this summer.

Her scoops have made waves in the worlds of politics, sport, business, defence, health and security. Insight’s investigation into abuse of small businesses by the publicly-owned bank RBS sparked a major inquiry by the financial services watchdog last year after the team’s evidence was passed to the secretary of state for business by a senior government advisor. Two peers were suspended from the House of Lords after Insight caught them offering to pull strings in the Parliament for six-figure sums. When the team caught retired military chiefs offering to push state arms deals for cash, the defence secretary responded by banning 2,500 retired officers from entering the Ministry of Defence. Insight’s exposure of the black market in Olympic tickets on the eve of the London Games resulted in a string of convictions and prompted the International Olympics Committee to overhaul its entire ticketing system.

Heidi started out as a graduate trainee at The Daily Telegraph in 2008 and went on to work as a general news reporter and then investigations reporter at the paper before leaving to join The Sunday Times as deputy Insight editor in 2011. She was promoted to assistant editor in March this year. She has won or been short-listed for more than a dozen national journalism awards.

She has a degree in journalism from the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Belgrade, and obtained her M.A. degree in political science at the University of Freiburg.

In 2013, she spent five months as an intern in the German Bundestag as part of the International Parliamentary Scholarship programme.

Her fields of research include defence integrity, parliamentary oversight of security actors, and public opinion on security issues.

Sheridan is the former Director of Innovation at Storyful, which was sold to News Corp in 2013. At Storyful he developed the methodologies for UGC discovery and verification that drove the newsroom, and was responsible for the development of event detection, recommendation and content discovery software. He is also an access to information (FOIA) specialist/trainer and an investigative/data journalist.

Helen has extensive experience of working to promote the right to information globally, including by assisting drafting and promoting implementation of access to information laws in Europe, Latin America, and Africa.

She is a founder and current chair of the Freedom of Information Advocates Network.

Helen’s human rights experience spans 20 years. She has worked with Article 19 (London and Paris, 1989-1998) and the Open Society Institute (Budapest and New York, 1999-2005) and as a consultant with inter-governmental organisations (including UNESCO, the Council of Europe, the OSCE, and the World Bank).

She has published and lectured widely on freedom of expression, access to information, human rights and democratisation. She holds a degree in History and Philosophy of Science (Psychology and Philosophy) from the University of Durham, in the UK. She speaks English, French and Spanish. Helen is based in Madrid, Spain.

http://www.access-info.org/

In this role, he managed FBI undercover operations nationally and internationally, and was a member of the International Working Group on police undercover operations and liaison with CIA and NSA.

He formulated the FBI’s undercover agent selection and training programmes, designed and implemented training programmes for Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.

He was the coordinator of terrorist task force and informant programmes.

One of the FBI’s original undercover agents, his projects included organised crime, biker gangs, corruption, insurance fraud, narcotics, money laundering, murder for hire, property theft, terrorism, white collar crime.

He was also an inmate at a maximum security prison, and utilised the witness protection programme for organised crime top-echelon informants.

Salmieri is trainer for Investigative Techniques Unlimited, and senior police adviser on organised crime, undercover operations, narcotics and terrorism to the Republic of Serbia.

He is a consultant to the FBI, the State Department, the US Departments of Justice, Food & Drug Administration and Police.

He has lectured in the Caribbean on undercover operations, money laundering and terrorist financing.

He also worked as a consultant for National Geographic Television’s July 2013 series ‘Inside the American Mob’.

Schoofs played a key role in investigations ranging from abuse and fraud in Medicare to the international methamphetamine trade. He contributed to the Journal’s coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. Prior to the Journal, Schoofs was a staff writer at The Village Voice, where he won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his eight-part series on AIDS in Africa. He has also written for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Esquire, Out, and many other publications. He teaches journalism at Yale University and holds two U.S. patents.

Between 1989 and 2003 he worked as music editor, director of programmes and general manager of Radio Television B92.

He served as president of B92′ s board of directors and a member of the board from 2003  until 2007.

Since 2007 Mirkovic has been the president of Trust B92 Ltd. (the biggest shareholder in B92) and the broadcaster’s director for external communications.

Sasa Mirkovic was one of the founders of ANEM (the association of independent electronic media) in 1993.

Since 2006 he has been the president of ANEM.

Sasa Mirkovic graduated from the law faculty at the University of Belgrade. He was born in 1967.