Case Study: The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) exposes global tax evasion and wins a Pulitzer with Neo4j

Neo4j Enables Pulitzer Prize-Winning Investigation into Global Tax Evasion

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) is a global network of nearly 400 journalists that faced the massive Panama Papers leak — 11.5 million documents spanning 40 years and 2.6 TB of data about over 200,000 companies in 21 tax havens. Journalists struggled to find hidden links across emails, spreadsheets and records in many languages, and needed an accessible way to analyze complex, interconnected data to expose cross-border tax evasion.

ICIJ extracted metadata with Apache Solr and Tika, then built a Neo4j graph (about 840,000 nodes and 1.3 million relationships) visualized via Linkurious and shared via OXWALL, enabling fast name searches and advanced Cypher queries that revealed concealed networks. The investigation exposed banks, politicians and criminal networks, prompted hundreds of probes and regulatory changes across 82+ countries, led to arrests and resignations, and earned ICIJ a 2017 Pulitzer Prize.

ICIJ

Mar Cabra

Editor