Paul Radu

Paul Radu is co-director and the head of innovation at OCCRP. He co-founded the organization in 2007 with Drew Sullivan. He leads OCCRP’s major investigative projects, scopes regional expansion, and develops new strategies and technology to expose organized crime and corruption across borders. 

He initiated and led the award-winning Laundromat investigation series, including the Russian, Azerbaijani, and Troika Laundromat investigations, and in the process coined the term “laundromat” to describe large-scale, all-purpose financial-fraud vehicles used to launder billions of dollars. He has helped lead numerous cross-border investigations, including Suisse Secrets and NarcoFiles.

Paul is also a co-creator of the Investigative Dashboard, a key tool that helps journalists trace assets and map complex networks of people, institutions, and connections in criminal enterprises. He helped co-found the Journalism Cloud Alliance, which seeks to make cloud-based infrastructure and services more secure, affordable, and sustainable for newsrooms, and is a member of the "AI Charter in Media" international committee.

In 2022, he co-founded Floodlight: Fiction in the Public Interest, which connects investigative reporting to the entertainment industry for adaptation into films and television series. In 2025, Paul co-created Floodlight Gaming, which connects investigative reporting to game developers for adaptation into interactive media experiences. He was co-executive producer for the 2022 award-winning documentary, The Killing of a Journalist, about the deaths of Ján Kuciak and Martina Kušnirová.

Paul co-founded the first European investigative reporting center in Romania in 2001 and he co-founded RISE Project, a platform for investigative reporters in Romania, in 2012. He has held numerous fellowships, including the Milena Jesenska Press Fellowship, the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism, the Knight International Journalism Fellowship, and the Stanford Knight Journalism Fellowship. He is also an Ashoka Global Fellow. 

Paul serves on the board of the Global Investigative Journalism Network, is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and is on the jury for the Sigma Data Journalism Awards and the European Journalism Awards.

His contributions to journalism have been recognized with numerous honors, including the Maria Ressa Prize for Courage in Investigative Journalism, the Daniel Pearl Award, the Global Shining Light Award, the European Press Prize, and the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. He was also part of the Panama Papers team that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Journalism. He has authored and contributed to several handbooks and digital guides such as “Against Corruption: a collection of essays,” “The Data Journalism Handbook,” and “Follow the Money — A Digital Guide to Tracking Corruption.”

Paul believes in citizen power and works to build the global infrastructure to empower everyone to become an investigator, fighting for their interests and demanding accountability.