Catalin Prisacariu

Catalin Prisacariu has been a journalist since 2000. He started as a reporter for a local weekly, then moved, still as a reporter, to a daily paper based in Iasi (the “capital” city of the Moldova region in eastern Romania), called “Ziarul de Iasi”

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

Heidi Blake

Heidi Blake is an assistant editor of The Sunday Times, attached to the Insight investigations team. 

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.

Katarina Djokic

Katarina Djokic has worked as a researcher at the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy since 2012. 

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.

Gavin Sheridan

Gavin Sheridan is the founder at Vizlegal, a legal research & analytics platform.

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 Darbishire

Helen Darbishire, Executive Director of Access Info Europe, is a human rights professional specialising in access to information, freedom of expression and media freedom

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/

Stephen A. Salmieri

Stephen Salmieri worked as Chief of Undercover Operations within the FBI for 29 years.

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’.

Mark Schoofs

Mark Schoofs is a senior editor at ProPublica. Before coming to ProPublica in 2011, he had worked for more than 11 years at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a foreign correspondent and an investigative reporter for Page One.

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.

Sasa Mirkovic

Sasa Mirkovic is one of the founders of Radio B92, one of the first independent broadcasters in Serbia, which began production in 1989

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.

Katrin Adams

Katrin is a senior advisor in the Regional Project on Social Protection and Prevention of Human Trafficking (SPPHT) implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) on the Western Balkans. 

After Katrin studied law in Gießen, Valencia (Spain) and Berlin, she completed a Master of Laws at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, Galway. Her post-graduate legal service traineeship included assignments to the International Criminal Court Task Force of the German Foreign Office and to the German Embassy in Nairobi. She qualified as “Volljuristin” in 2006.

Katrin started her professional career in an international law firm in Berlin. From 2007 to 2008 she was the Executive Director of a German Federal Alliance against Trafficking in Women and Violence against Migrant Women (KOK e.V.). She joined GIZ (formerly GTZ) in 2008 and since worked on various rule of law, governance, human rights and gender issues. She has advised, inter alia, projects in Cambodia, Uganda, Latin America and on the Balkans from Eschborn (Germany) before she moved to Belgrade to join the team of the Regional Programme on Social Protection and Prevention of Human Trafficking (SPPHT) in 2012.

Philipp Grüll

Philipp Grüll was born in 1982 and studied communication science, politics and law in Munich and Venice, Italy.

During his studies he worked as a freelance journalist for Süddeutsche Zeitung and the news agency DDP. Since 2010, he has reported for the public broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR). He focuses on political issues for the magazines “Kontrovers” (BR) and “report München” on the nationwide ARD-channel “Das Erste”. He co-authored the documentary “Tito’s Murder Squads – The Killing of Yugoslav Exiles in Germany” alongside Frank Hofmann. He has received several awards for his journalistic work.