Case Study: International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) achieves breakthrough in unraveling Panama Papers' hidden networks with Neo4j

ICIJ - Customer Case Study

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), led on data work by Mar Cabra, faced the enormous task of coordinating roughly 400 journalists across 80 countries to analyze 11.5 million documents (about 2.6 TB) from the Panama Papers — unstructured PDFs, emails and company records tied to Mossack Fonseca — to expose hidden ownership and offshore networks.

ICIJ transformed the data into a Neo4j graph and deployed Linkurious on private servers, paired with an internal search engine and collaboration hub, enabling quick ETL, secure access and visual exploration. The setup let reporters rapidly find previously unseen connections, drove widespread global reporting and political attention, supported a public database release, and helped grow the ICIJ’s in‑house data capacity.

ICIJ

Mar Cabra

Editor