Tracking truth

Miranda Patrucic has exposed corruption across Central Asia and in Europe. The award-winning journalist talks to Fraud Magazine about her experiences and the challenges she’s faced in tracking down corrupt officials across the globe and why they still evade the law.

Miranda Patrucic had heard the talk about Montenegro’s long-standing leader Milo Dukanovic and how he’d amassed a level of wealth that was vastly disproportionate to his meager government official’s salary. It all sounded very dubious. So, in 2009 when Patrucic, then an up-and-coming investigative reporter, was assigned to do a profile on the politician, she started digging into the public records to see what suspicious assets she could find. This was about to be her first big scoop.

While Montenegro had a land registry, you could only search for a property owner if you knew their national identity number, which Patrucic didn’t have. So, with the aid of a data-searching add-on from free software site Mozilla, she downloaded hundreds of land records from a randomly chosen wealthy area of Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. The hard work paid off. She found a property connected to a member of the president’s family and in turn a national identity number that acted as a key to unlock ownership in other properties.