Public event

From contracts to oligarchs: how open data can power investigations into public spending and its beneficiaries

Join us for a discussion about the databases and digital tools that can help you understand government spending in Germany and the EU, and who profits from it.

This two-hour in-person workshop will include practical demonstrations of tools to research Russian assets and companies of sanctioned oligarchs; strategies for detecting risks in government contracts; and other tips for tracking public projects that keep our society running. While there will be a focus on Germany, we will also discuss best practices from the region.

This event is organised by the European Research Centre for Anti-Corruption and State-Building (ERCAS) in cooperation with Open Contracting Partnership, YouControl and SEEK Initiative

Speakers

  • Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is Professor of Democracy Studies at the Hertie School and Director of the European Research Centre for Anti-Corruption and State-Building (ERCAS). She is the author of A Quest for Good Governance - How Societies Build Control of Corruption (2015) and of Europe’s Burden - Promoting Good Governance across Borders (2019), both with Cambridge University Press. Mungiu-Pippidi also chairs the Expert Group on Corruption Measurement of the UNODC and has consulted for the World Bank, UNDP, the International Monetary Fund, the European Parliament, the Swedish Government, and others. Her research projects have resulted in commons like corruptionrisk.org, europam.eu and opentender.eu.

  • Frederik Richter has been a financial and investigative journalist covering business, corruption and fraud for 15 years. He is currently Managing Editor at CORRECTIV, Germany’s first non-profit investigative newsroom. Frederik has reported from over a dozen countries in the Middle East, Europe and South East Asia. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Reuters, International Herald Tribune, Die Zeit, Handelsblatt, ZDF and ARD. He has covered fraud and corruption, capital markets and central banks as well as politics and civil unrest. His main interest is the space where business and politics overlap.

  • Georg Neumann is Head of Communications at the Open Contracting Partnership, a global organisation opening up and transforming public procurement. Previously, at the Inter-American Development Bank, Georg led the Digital Strategy of the Multilateral Investment Fund and co-initiated the organisation’s portfolio piloting social innovations such as crowdfunding in the region. At Transparency International, he managed online and internal communications of the global movement and led the discussion of solutions to use technology to fight corruption. He has worked in development projects in Mexico and Morocco and holds a Masters in Strategic Economic and Social Communications from the University of Fine Arts in Berlin.

  • Veronika Boyko is social direction chief at YouControl, a Ukrainian IT-company that creates solutions based on open data. Skilled in open data analytics, social media marketing, she organized trainings and taught more than 1700 journalists in Ukraine and abroad how to use analytical instruments in investigations.

  • Julian Brummer studied Political Science, Sociology and Public Law in Bonn, Ankara and Vienna. Currently, he is a candidate for the Master of Public Policy at Hertie School, where he focusses on corruption, rule of law and digitalisation. In his thesis, he assesses the control of corruption in Germany’s public procurement and explores digital transparency tools to enhance its integrity. Julian is also a research assistant at the WZB Berlin and worked previously at the European Parliament as well as the Institute for European Politics (IEP), among others. He is a member of Transparency International Germany and is a head of programme at Polis180 e.V., where he coordinates all activities on Central, Eastern and Southwestern Europe.

Moderator

  • Sophie Brown is a communications specialist at the Open Contracting Partnership and a representative of the SEEK Initiative, a consortium dedicated to empowering citizen investigators. She previously worked as a journalist for Euronews in Berlin and CNN International in Hong Kong, and as a press officer at Transparency International.