# ICIJ The **International Consortium of Investigative Journalists** is the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit newsroom that has coordinated nearly every major offshore-finance leak of the past decade. Founded in 1997 as a project of the Center for Public Integrity and spun out as an independent organization in 2017, ICIJ's model is large-scale **cross-border collaboration**: when a leaked dataset arrives at a partner newsroom, ICIJ shares the raw material with hundreds of journalists across dozens of countries, who simultaneously file country-specific stories. The model has made it impossible for any single government, law firm, or oligarch to suppress an offshore-leak story by intimidating one publisher. ICIJ's coordination is the load-bearing infrastructure behind the [[Panama Papers]] (2016), [[Paradise Papers]] (2017), [[FinCEN Files]] (2020), [[Pandora Papers]] (2021), [[Suisse Secrets]] (2022), and [[Cyprus Confidential]] (2023). It also coordinated LuxLeaks (2014), Swiss Leaks (2015), Implant Files (2018), and the Uber Files (2022). The model works because no single ICIJ partner has to bear the full legal exposure: when Süddeutsche Zeitung received the original Panama Papers tip from "John Doe," ICIJ shared the 2.6 TB dataset with 100+ media organizations in 80 countries, and the resulting simultaneous global publication made injunctions and intimidation infeasible. This is the operational answer to the long-standing problem of leak suppression — turn the leak into a synchronized worldwide event. ## See Also - [[Offshore Financial Secrecy]] — the system ICIJ exposes - [[Criminalizing Whistleblowers]] — the legal counter-pressure on ICIJ sources - [[Tax Havens]] — the jurisdictional layer the leaks document