Being a reader and a supporter of the Center for Public Integrity, you see the headlines from us every week about the effects of money’s influence on government power.

Just last week, for example, the Center examined the funding sources and top sponsors behind expense-paid seminars for all federal judges. Our investigation revealed that some of the world’s largest oil and pharmaceutical companies, including ExxonMobil, Pfizer and BP, and other special interest groups, such as the Koch Foundation, were paying for this judicial travel. In potential conflicts of interest, the report also found instances where judges later ruled in favor of the sponsors of seminars they had attended.

As the tweets, comments and posts came pouring in, it was clear that thousands of readers like you feel strongly that no branch or level of government now seems immune from the influence of money. Here’s a selection of what some of you had to say on Twitter:

Sometimes our independent judiciary doesn't look so independent bit.ly/10kGv3x

— Public Campaign (@publicampaign) March 28, 2013

It's a conflict of interest when federal judges attend corporate sponsored seminars publicintegrity.org/2013/03/28/123…#occupy#occupyusa#p2

— Dave (@Merlyn43) March 28, 2013

Corruption. Justice 4 profit is not justice. RT Corporations, pro-business nonprofits foot bill for judicial seminars publicintegrity.org/2013/03/28/123…

— DrLearnALot (@DrLearnALot) March 28, 2013

CME isn't just for doctors. Pharma companies also pay for events to train judges as well, reports CPI: ow.ly/jxIDU

— Alexander Gaffney (@AlecGaffney) March 28, 2013

DEMOCRACY? Bought and paid! Corporations, pro-business nonprofits foot bill for judicial seminars zite.to/11QzCw1 via @zite

— linksteroh (@linksteroh) March 28, 2013

It took a team of eight reporters and editors many months and numerous Freedom of Information Act requests to report this story of corporate influence at the highest levels of the federal judiciary. The Center is dedicated to digging below the surface to produce significant reports like these in the public interest. As you might imagine, it takes considerable resources to review and analyze tens of thousands of documents and volumes of data, conduct scores of interviews and contact more than 40 trip sponsors as well as the judges named in the investigation.

Deep investigative reporting like this requires exceptional support.

Please help keep The Center for Public Integrity’s robust investigative work moving forward. The Center does not accept contributions from governments or anonymous sources. We count on support from readers — citizens like you — to maintain our no-stone-unturned style of accountability and transparency reporting. Our reporting reaches nearly 300,000 people every month on our website, in our emails, and on social media, and millions more on our media partner websites and in publications across the country and around the world.

We are dedicated to seeking the truth on your behalf. Our mission is to serve democracy by revealing abuses of power, corruption and betrayal of public trust by powerful public and private institutions, using the tools of investigative journalism.

Help us to continue to be your watchdog in the corridors of power. Please take a moment to support the Center today!

Thank you,

William E. Buzenberg
Executive Director

The Center for Public Integrity is investing in the coverage of finance and money-in- politics issues with four new hires.

Alison Fitzgerald, a 2009 Polk Award winner, author and longtime Bloomberg economics and enterprise reporter, will oversee the Center’s financial coverage as well as much of its state money-in-politics work. She is joined by Dan Wagner, who comes to the Center from the Associated Press’ Washington bureau, where he specialized in financial regulation.

Both Alison and Dan will start, appropriately enough, on tax day, April 15.

The money-in-politics beat received a major boost this week when Ben Wieder, a computer-assisted reporting specialist, began work Monday. Ben will be joined by Alan Suderman, who has broken numerous stories on Washington D.C.’s government as a staff writer with the Washington City Paper. Alan and Ben will focus mostly on state-level political money coverage. Alan starts April 29.

Alison’s career highlights include writing the 2011 book “In Too Deep: BP and the Drilling Race that Took it Down.” Her reporting has appeared in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune, among other publications. Prior to joining Bloomberg in 2000, Alison worked as a reporter, and then international editor, for the Associated Press. She also has worked as a reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer and Palm Beach Post in Florida.

Alison is a graduate of Georgetown University and earned a master’s degree from Northwestern University. Given her fluency in French and Italian, it’s perhaps appropriate that the long list of reporting awards she’s won includes a 2008 Overseas Press Club honor. Her coverage of secretive political donors won her a 2011 National Press Foundation Everett Dirksen Award for distinguished reporting of Congress.

Dan has worked at the Associated Press since 2008, where is most recent work focused on financial regulation reporting, particularly the banking industry’s relationship with official Washington. Among his many scoops and deep dives are stories on former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's close Wall Street contacts, government subsidies to abusive mortgage companies, lavish spending by bailed-out bankers.

Before joining the Associated Press, Dan worked for two years at Newsday, where he won a National Headliner Award for uncovering risky lending by American Home Mortgage — a practice that helped lead to the company’s demise. Dan, a graduate of Harvard University, has also worked stints at the Boston Globe and National Public Radio.

Ben comes to the Center from Stateline.org, where he worked as a staff writer focused on education policy and data analysis. He will track non-candidate political spending in the states as well as Federal Election Commission activity. Ben is a graduate of Amherst College in Massachusetts and earned a master’s degree in print and digital reporting from the Missouri School of Journalism. He’s also interned with Newsday, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting.

Alan’s experience includes writing a weekly column and daily blog on Washington, D.C., politics, and his work covering shady government contracting practices and elected officials’ questionable ethics have led to formal investigations. Prior to joining the Washington City Paper, Alan worked as a reporter for the Washington Examiner, the Juneau Empire in Alaska and the Associated Press’ Helena, Mont., bureau. A graduate of Southwestern University in Texas, Alan also earned a journalism master’s degree from Northwestern University. He’s also a former Peace Corps volunteer who worked in the African nation of Guinea.

The new hires  mark the Center's return to financial journalism and make the Consider the Source project team one of the largest focused on political influence issues in the nation.

A trade group for air shows — stung in recently weeks by sequestration's grounding of military aircraft demonstrations— is launching a government affairs offensive.

Lobbying firm Van Scoyoc Associates is now representing the International Council of Air Shows, Inc., lobbying on "air shows regarding sequestration related issues," according to a U.S. Senate document filed today. It marks the first time the International Council of Air Shows has ever hired federal lobbyists.

Jennifer Cave, a former legislative aide to ex-Sen. John Warner, R-Va., is one of two lobbyists handing the account, the filing indicates. Cave also has worked as a special assistant to the National Security Council and Senate Armed Services Committee.

Michael W. Schupp will also lobby on the International Council of Air Shows's behalf.

The move to hire lobbyists is necessary because the freeze on military aircraft demonstrations, such as those conducted by the Air Force's Thunderbirds and Navy's Blue Angels, "represents a threat to our existence as an industry," said John Cudahy, the council's president.

"Dozens, maybe hundreds, of air shows across the country will go out of business if this continues," Cudahy told the Center for Public Integrity. "Some areas have had 10, 15 or 20 percent cuts they've had to deal with. We've seen a 100 percent cut in the support the U.S. military can provide air shows."

Cudahy argues that air shows generate up to $1.5 billion in business annually and are often the public's only up-close link to the military equipment its tax dollars fund. Several dozen air shows — of the roughly 350 that typically take place — have already been canceled this year, he added.

"It's never been necessary for us to hire a lobbyist. It's a pretty mom-and-apple-pie industry," Cudahy said. "But we have to do this now."

Van Scoyoc Associates is being retained on a month-to-month contract, Cudahy added.

In a message to members this month on its website, the Council also urged supporters to individually advocate for air shows whenever possible.

"Tell the public about all of the aerial entertainment that will be available at your event. Emphasize your dates, location and website URL," the message stated.

It continued: "Even if your show never expected to receive military support, turn the media’s current interest in air shows into an opportunity to raise awareness about your event in your community. In 'normal' circumstances, you would welcome coverage and exposure many weeks before your event, so be sure to take full advantage of that publicity in these not-so-normal times."

If anyone thought Chuck Hagel wants to be a caretaker defense secretary, he worked hard to disabuse them of the idea in an April 3 speech to a roomful of generals and other senior officers at Washington’s National Defense University, an elite school chartered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Hagel, a former Senator and longtime Washington politician, knows that the first tasks of any policymaker seeking major change are to broadcast intent and build a constituency — and he clearly sought to begin that process in his first major address since being confirmed in March by the smallest margin of any defense secretary.

“The world today is combustible and complex,” Hagel said, before making clear that everything done by his two predecessors — Robert Gates and Leon Panetta — is now up for grabs, due to the austere fiscal climate and Hagel’s own stated desire to refocus his department more carefully on future military threats.

Yes, both men organized cutbacks in planned spending, Hagel said. “However, we will have to do more.” Hagel said he is now seeking change “that involves not just tweaking or chipping away at existing structures and practices but where necessary fashioning entirely new ones that are better suited to 21st century realities and challenges.”

His premier targets, he said, will be the three areas responsible for the greatest spending growth in recent years: acquisitions, personnel costs, and overhead.

Essentially backhanding the past four years of incremental change in Pentagon procurement practices under Obama, Hagel said “the military’s modernization strategy still depends on systems that are vastly more expensive and technologically risky than what was promised or budgeted for.” His point was underscored last week by a Government Accountability Office report that said the largest 86 Pentagon weapons programs were a total of $400 billion over their initial budget, and an average of 27 months behind schedule.

Hagel warned that if current trends continue, the steady growth in funding for “existing structures and institutions,” personnel, and replacements for aging weapons will prevent needed spending on operations, readiness, and new technologies. He said the Pentagon needs instead to design “an acquisition system … that rewards cost-effectiveness and efficiency, so that our programs do not continue to take longer, cost more, and deliver less than initially planned and promised.”

In a passage that doubtless made some weapons program managers squirm, Hagel approvingly quoted a warning from retired admiral and former chief of naval operations Gary Roughead that without reform, the Pentagon risks spending all its money on “limited quantities of irrelevant and overpriced equipment.”

He also said the number and type of civilian and military personnel employed by the department would be re-evaluated, and that he intended to “re-look” at the funding for the Pentagon itself and its myriad agency headquarters, including the Missile Defense Agency.

His speech was notably lacking in detailed prescriptions, and comes less than a week before the department’s release of a proposed budget for fiscal year 2014 that was largely drafted by Panetta. Hagel  also gave himself an out: “It could turn out that making dramatic changes in each of these areas could prove unwise, untenable, or politically impossible.”

But Hagel has told top officials to present some new ideas to him by May, a timetable that makes the defense budget deliberations on Capitol Hill this year likely to be even more uncertain and interesting than they were in 2012.

A New York state senator and five other political officials have been named in a sweeping federal corruption case — the latest in a series of scandals that helped earn the Empire State a D grade from the State Integrity Investigation.

At the heart of the complaint unsealed Tuesday: federal prosecutors say Sen. Malcolm Smith, a Democrat from Queens, used a series of contacts in an attempt to bribe New York City Republican Party officials to approve his bid for mayor on the GOP ticket.

The case, which allegedly involved tens of thousands of dollars in bribes and agreements to secure state and city funds for development projects, highlights some of the endemic  corruption problems that have plagued New York’s legislature in Albany, where politicians are frequently accused of exchanging cash for securing state funds and candidates exchange donations for political support. The image was reinforced by the State Integrity Investigation, a state-by-state ranking of accountability and transparency carried out last year by the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity and Public Radio International.

According to the complaint, Smith had ambitions to run for mayor of New York City, but wanted to run as a Republican. As a Democratic state senator, he needed support from the party to get on the ticket. The solution presented itself in the form of a New York real estate developer, who was cooperating with an undercover FBI agent in exchange for leniency on unspecified charges.

Over a series of meetings the developer and the FBI agent agreed to bribe two New York City GOP officials, Joseph Savino and Vincent Tabone, to garner their for support for Smith. In exchange, Smith would help secure state funds for a project of the developer’s. At one meeting, the developer told Smith it would cost, “a pretty penny,” to which Smith replied, “It’s worth it.” Savino allegedly asked for $25,000, Tabone for $50,000. On February 14, the agent met separately with Savino and Tabone in his car, handing Savino $15,000 in cash and Tabone $25,000.

The case also extends to several other local officials. Daniel Halloran, a New York City councilman, allegedly facilitated the meetings between the undercover agent and the GOP officials. Unrelated to the Smith dealings, however, he had also allegedly accepted tens of thousands of dollars in cash from the developer and the undercover agent in exchange for securing city funds to the developer. In one of their meetings where the developer handed over $7,500 in cash, Halloran said, “That’s politics, it’s all about how much,” adding, “that's our politicians in New York.”

The suit also includes charges of mail fraud against the mayor, Noramie Jasmine, and deputy mayor, Joseph Desmaret of Spring Valley, where the development was to be located, for their involvement.

The State Integrity Investigation, released in March 2012, detailed a long history of scandal in New York, including pay-to-play deals and political cronyism. The report gave New York a D- specifically in the category of political financing, with particularly weak grades for the financing of political parties.

A cache of 2.5 million files has cracked open the secrets of more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts, exposing hidden dealings of politicians, con men and the mega-rich the world over.

The secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists lay bare the names behind covert companies and private trusts in the British Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands and other offshore hideaways.

They include American doctors and dentists and middle-class Greek villagers as well as families and associates of long-time despots, Wall Street swindlers, Eastern European and Indonesian billionaires, Russian corporate executives, international arms dealers and a sham-director-fronted company that the European Union has labeled as a cog in Iran’s nuclear-development program.

The leaked files provide facts and figures — cash transfers, incorporation dates, links between companies and individuals — that illustrate how offshore financial secrecy has spread aggressively around the globe, allowing the wealthy and the well-connected to dodge taxes and fueling corruption and economic woes in rich and poor nations alike. The records detail the offshore holdings of people and companies in more than 170 countries and territories.

The hoard of documents represents the biggest stockpile of inside information about the offshore system ever obtained by a media organization. The total size of the files, measured in gigabytes, is more than 160 times larger than the leak of U.S. State Department documents by Wikileaks in 2010.

To analyze the documents, ICIJ collaborated with reporters from The Guardian and the BBC in the U.K., Le Monde in France, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Germany, The Washington Post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and 31 other media partners around the world.

Eighty-six journalists from 46 countries used high-tech data crunching and shoe-leather reporting to sift through emails, account ledgers and other files covering nearly 30 years.

“I’ve never seen anything like this. This secret world has finally been revealed,” said Arthur Cockfield, a law professor and tax expert at Queen’s University in Canada, who reviewed some of the documents during an interview with the CBC. He said the documents remind him of the scene in the movie classic The Wizard of Oz in which “they pull back the curtain and you see the wizard operating this secret machine.”

Click through to ICIJ.org to continue reading.

A handful of donors to the nonprofit Republican Governors Association Public Policy Committee got a rude surprise when the Internal Revenue Service mistakenly outed them by making available part of a tax form that is supposed to be kept private.

The Center obtained a copy of the group’s Form 990 from a website that displays tax returns online. The return included one page of the “Schedule B” list of donors which the IRS does not require to be made public.

The total donations on the page make up a small percentage of the $5 million the nonprofit took in for calendar 2011, but also provide a rare if limited glimpse at who — or what — funds political nonprofits.

Among the donors:

• HCA Inc., the largest operator of private hospitals in the country, which donated $89,000.

• Healthsouth Corp., one of the largest operators of rehabilitation services in the country gave $10,500. A 2003 investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission charged the company  with systematically overstating its earnings. Two years later, the firm agreed to pay $100 million to settle the charges.

• Boyden Gray, former U.S. ambassador to the European Union in the George W. Bush administration and White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush, gave $15,000. Gray is currently a board member of the conservative organization American Action Network.

• David Humphreys, CEO of Missouri-based TAMKO Building Products, which manufactures materials for residential and commercial construction, gave $50,000. Humphreys is reportedly the second-largest donor to candidates in his home state since 2008, and is on the board of the Koch family-funded Institute for Humane Studies, a free-market economics center at George Mason University.

• Robert Harris, president of a New Jersey consulting firm that advises drug and medical device companies, gave $50,000. Harris was selected to be on New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s transition team as an economic development adviser in 2010.

• James Haslam, chairman and chief executive of Pilot Flying J, the largest truck stop chain in North America, gave $10,000. Haslam’s brother Bill is the Republican governor of Tennessee.

HCA Inc.’s donations helped the RGA nonprofit oppose the implementation of the 2010 health care reform law even though the company supported the bill’s passage in March 2010. This year it has backed states that have accepted the Medicaid expansion funds that the law provides.

The Tennessee-based corporation has also given $300,000 to the RGA’s 527 group since 2010. 

The company, through spokesman Ed Fishbough, said it supports the RGA while “understanding we will not always have consensus” on “issues of concern.”

RGA spokesman Michael Schrimpf says that donor information is confidential, and “its partial disclosure by the IRS was erroneous and unauthorized. In fact, it is a felony to disclose the information.”

In an email to the Center, Grant Williams, a spokesman for the IRS wrote: “Federal privacy laws don’t allow the IRS to comment on specific situations or cases.”

The Center’s publication of the material is protected by the First Amendment.

Last year, the IRS also inadvertently released documents for a prolific nonprofit group Crossroads GPS, which the investigative outlet ProPublica published.

The Democratic and Republican governors’ associations are increasingly relying on nonprofit affiliates to get their candidates elected and influence ballot initiatives, a move that allows them to avoid disclosing the identity of their donors.

The Washington, D.C.,-based Republican Governors Association and Democratic Governors Association are the most prolific outside spending groups in state-level elections, but as so-called 527 political organizations, they are required to make their donors public.

Their nonprofit affiliates, however, are not.

The RGA’s Republican Governors Association Public Policy Committee nonprofit spent $1.3 million between 2005 and 2009. During 2011, spending spiked to nearly $10 million, Internal Revenue Service filings indicate.

The DGA, meanwhile, established a nonprofit called America Works USA in 2011, which raised and spent $4.4 million.

The governors associations still spend far more through their 527 groups. The DGA spent $49 million and the RGA spent $77 million during the 2012 election cycle.

But rising spending by the RGA and DGA’s nonprofits, which have funded state-level battles over union rights, supreme court seats, tax policy and national healthcare reform, has gone largely unnoticed — and is likely to increase this year and next when 38 governorships are up for election.

The increase, says RGA spokesman Michael Schrimpf, is because “the number of GOP governors has increased along with the importance of their role as policy leaders.”

The 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision allowed nonprofits to accept unlimited donations from corporations, unions and individuals and spend the money on advertising in an attempt to elect or defeat candidates.

As spending by nonprofits and super PACs has exploded in federal elections, the same trend can be seen at the state level, says Stetson University law professor Ciara Torres-Spelliscy.

“The governors associations are sophisticated players, so if there’s a new tool to influence politics, they’re going to be early adopters,” she said.

Primary purpose

The new prominence of nonprofits has come with controversy.

Watchdog groups, and now a U.S. senator, have called on the Internal Revenue Service to investigate and New York’s attorney general has proposed new disclosure rules for nonprofits that spend money on elections in the state.

At the center of the dispute are vague IRS rules that require 501(c)(4) nonprofit groups to be primarily focused on promoting “social welfare,” not election campaigns.

“The rule of thumb,” says Torres-Spelliscy, “is that 50 percent of a nonprofit’s money has to go to something other than politics.”

Despite the requirement, America Works USA — the Democratic nonprofit — spent about 70 percent of its budget on “media buys and production” in two races for governor in the last half of 2011 and the first half of 2012, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of unreleased tax records.

DGA spokesman Danny Kanner says America Works USA’s “primary purpose is not political.”

When the RGA nonprofit applied for tax-exempt status in 2004, it told the IRS it would host policy forums and workshops, not get involved in campaigns for elected office.

The RGA said 60 percent of its money would be devoted to educational forums and only 20 percent of its resources would go to “mass media, including direct mail, newspaper, radio and television advertisements and websites.”

By 2011, however, the nonprofit had spent only 2 percent of its budget — $196,000 — on conferences and 50 percent of its budget on ads, according to IRS filings.

Spreading the wealth

The RGA nonprofit and its Democratic counterpart have also channeled a good portion of their funds to a network of state-level nonprofit groups.

In what has become a common “Russian nesting doll” funding technique, the RGA nonprofit has given 40 percent of its budget since 2010 to other nonprofits — some of which passed the money onto other nonprofits and political committees.

For example, the RGA nonprofit gave $200,000 to a D.C.-based nonprofit called ReAL Action in 2010. ReAL Action is an affiliate of Renewing American Leadership, a nonprofit founded by former presidential candidate Newt Gingrich.

It is “dedicated to renewing America through the restoration and application of biblical values,” and shares an office with the conservative Christian nonprofit Concerned Women for America.

ReAL Action then distributed the funds to three Christian groups focused on unseating Iowa’s Supreme Court justices who had ruled unanimously in 2009 in favor of gay marriage rights.

One of those nonprofits, the political arm of the Mississippi-based American Family Association, in turn gave money to support yet another political committee called Iowa for Freedom.

Run by Republican and failed gubernatorial candidate Bob Vander Plaats, Iowa for Freedom ran ads attacking “liberal, out-of-control judges ignoring our traditional values,” and was successful in unseating the three judges who faced a retention vote in 2010.

Midwest battleground

The DGA nonprofit doled out a fifth of its budget to other nonprofit groups in 2011. It sent its largest grant to the Midwest, where the nonprofit Greater Wisconsin Committee was mobilizing against Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s budget bill.

Greater Wisconsin put the $425,000 grant toward a multimillion dollar ad campaign against Walker’s controversial budget plan, which sparked mass protest at the state capitol.

It also launched ads opposing David Prosser, a conservative candidate who won his re-election bid to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2011. 

Both the RGA and DGA fueled a ballot initiative in Ohio to repeal Republican Gov. John Kasich’s law curtailing union bargaining rights for public employees.

The RGA made its largest grant to Make Ohio Great, a nonprofit, which shares a D.C. address with the RGA and supported Kasich’s law.

The nonprofit hired Rex Elsass, an Ohio-based political consultant whose business counted Kasich as a client and would later produce ads for Todd Akin, a former congressman and failed Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Missouri.

Kasich’s anti-collective bargaining law was repealed by 61 percent of Ohio voters in a 2011 special election.

Funding phantoms

The RGA nonprofit gave a large grant to a shadowy Missouri-based nonprofit called Take Initiative America, even when it appeared the group was running afoul of the IRS.

The group is run by a Missouri lawyer and Republican operative named Charles A. Hurth III. His group has never filed annual tax returns, leading the IRS to revoke its exempt status in 2011.

Still, the RGA nonprofit gave $700,000 to the organization that same year, funds put toward “the expansion of public choice,” according to its tax filing.

Hurth was infamously arrested for biting a woman’s buttocks in a bar, for which a jury ordered him to pay $27,500 in damages. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In 2010, Hurth’s group spent around $532,000 on a petition drive in Texas to place a Green Party candidate on the ballot for governor. The state’s Democratic Party, whose candidate lost to Gov. Rick Perry in the race, sued unsuccessfully to keep the Green candidate off the ballot.

RGA spokesman Schrimpf defended the contribution to Take Initiative America, calling it a “well-known” organization.

Meanwhile, the DGA nonprofit has itself has kept a low profile.

Its vague name, America Works USA, conjures no connection to its parent group. It has a shell of a website with no contact information on it, and nothing on the DGA’s website mentions its nonprofit group.

Kanner, however, says the DGA is “proud and open” about its support for America Works USA.

More than 50 countries have banned asbestos, a toxic mineral used in building materials, insulation, automobile brakes and other products.

The United States isn’t one of them. Last year, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, 1,060 metric tons – more than 2.3 million pounds – came into the country, all of it from Brazil. “Based on current trends,” the USGS says, “U.S. asbestos consumption is likely to remain near the 1,000-ton level…”

Public health experts and anti-asbestos activists find this distressing.

Linda Reinstein, who lost her husband to mesothelioma, an especially virulent form of cancer tied to asbestos exposure, said she’s “appalled and disgusted that the United States still allows the importation of asbestos to meet so-called manufacturing needs.

“We’ve known for decades that safer substitutes exist,” said Reinstein, president of the California-based Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization. “We’re facing a public health crisis where more than 30 Americans die every day from preventable, asbestos-caused diseases.”

To mark National Asbestos Awareness Week, Reinstein plans to hold a press conference in Washington today to highlight U.S. investment firms she says hold stakes in Brazilian asbestos mining and production. “It’s time we protect public health over the profits of these companies,” she said.

The World Health Organization estimates that 107,000 people worldwide die of asbestos-related diseases each year. A Center for Public Integrity investigation, done in tandem with the BBC in 2010, revealed that the global asbestos industry, with help from scientists and lobbyists, continues to aggressively market its wares in developing nations, putting millions at risk of disease. Russia remains the world’s biggest asbestos producer, followed by China and Brazil.

Asbestos use in the United States has plummeted from its peak of 803,000 metric tons in 1973. Still, attempts at a ban have failed. The Environmental Protection Agency tried in 1989 but was thwarted by an industry court challenge.

The USGS says the chlor-alkali industry – a segment of the chemical industry that makes chlorine and a caustic soda called sodium hydroxide – accounted for about 57 percent of domestic asbestos consumption in 2012. Forty-one percent of the imported asbestos went into roofing products and the rest into “unknown applications.”

In a statement, the American Chemistry Council, a trade association, said, "The chlor-alkali production processes that involve the use of asbestos are strictly regulated" by the EPA and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

“Diaphragms made of asbestos are a critical separation medium in the chlorine manufacturing process," the council said. "Chlorine is essential for manufacturing life-saving medicines, producing solar cells, and providing safe drinking water."

Chlorine producers "work to manage the risks and potential adverse effects to human health and the environment," the trade group said. "Workers potentially exposed to asbestos are protected by wearing appropriate personal protective equipment and following strict work processes. Employees in the chlor-alkali industry are given annual medical examinations to determine whether an employee has incurred any adverse effects due to any possible exposure.”

Nonetheless, authorities such as the International Agency for Research on Cancer and the International Labor Organization warn that there is no safe level of asbestos exposure.

Richard Lemen, an adjunct professor at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and a retired assistant U.S. surgeon general, said that until the U.S. bans asbestos, “Americans are still at risk of developing highly preventable asbestos-related disease.”

Promoting competition among military contractors is the “single most powerful tool available” to the Pentagon to improve productivity and drive down costs, the U.S. government’s chief weapons buyer Frank Kendall declared in March 2011 testimony to a Senate subcommittee.

Moreover, auditors and government officials have repeatedly described the routine use of noncompetitive contracts as one of the signal mistakes of the U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, contributing to the waste of billions of dollars in those conflicts.

Yet the cold reality, as spelled out in a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, is that the Pentagon’s use of competitively-bid contracts has been declining steadily for the past five years and last year stood at just 57 percent of its total contract spending. In fiscal year 2008, it was 62.6 percent.

The Air Force rate was the lowest — just 37 percent — followed by the Navy and the Army. The Defense Logistics Agency, which buys weapons parts and supplies troops in the field, did much better, achieving a rate of 83 percent for its spending in 2012.

Nobody knows why the rate is steadily going down, the GAO report said, although it noted that the number of sole-source — or noncompetitive —contracts in the Pentagon’s database is inflated somewhat by purchases made by foreign governments, which typically specify a particular weapon and supplier. Also, the Air Force and Navy tend to buy large equipment in small numbers from specialized suppliers, such as the makers of ships and planes.

Nonetheless, the information compiled by the Defense Department provides “limited insight into the underlying reasons for competition or its decline since fiscal year 2008,” the GAO said. And when foreign sales are removed from the data, the Air Force competition rate still was only 49.8 percent.

The worsening statistics belie a concerted effort under Kendall, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics, to goad the military services into putting more of their contracts up for competitive bid, even in circumstances where only one good supplier appears to exist. That effort has been provoked by mergers that have reduced the overall number of military vendors in recent years.

The Pentagon has implemented its reforms in such a loose fashion that it cannot “systematically identify, track and consider the key factors that may impact” their competition rate, according to the GAO.

Regulations require that justifications for sole-source contracting be publicly released within two weeks, but in a third of all cases, the information was not disclosed, the GAO said. It urged the Pentagon to work harder at all aspects of the problems, provoking an official in Kendall’s office to promise in an official response included in the GAO report that it would.

Just as a National Rifle Association task force unveiled its “National School Shield” report this week, a detailed critique from three criminologists termed the gun lobby’s push for enhanced school security “superficially simple.”

Two professors at Marshall University in West Virginia who are studying incarcerated school shooters and one professor at The Citadel, South Carolina’s military school, published their jointly written critique this month in the American Journal of Criminal Justice.

The criminologists began their review last December after the NRA announced its “National School Shield” project in response to a gunman’s massacre of 20 first-graders and six educators in a Newtown, Conn. school.  The NRA’s initial thrust was to urge schools to hire more police, but also persuade states to allow teachers or other willing staff or volunteers to carry arms. The NRA said it would provide training. In addition, the firearms association formed a task force to study schools’ vulnerabilities and make suggestions.

That  task force unveiled a 225-page report at a press conference Tuesday with “best practices” recommendations, including advice on installing bullet-proof glass and surveillance equipment, redesigning doors and outdoor areas, seeking advice from consultants and putting an armed guard or armed employee in every school.

“Let me emphasize, this is not talking about (arming) all teachers,” said task force director Asa Hutchinson, a former congressman from Arkansas who also was an administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “Teachers should teach. But if there is a personnel that has good experience and has an interest in it, and is willing to go through this training of, again, 40 to 60 hours that is totally comprehensive, then that is an appropriate resource that a school should be able to utilize."

The report offers a guide to school resource officers. It suggests schools use specific types of programs to identify and treat students who might be at risk of committing violence.

After looking over the report, the criminologists saw nothing that would change their conclusions about the NRA’s ideas, according to one of the authors, Angela Crews, professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Marshall University in Huntington, W. Va. Crews’ co-authors are her husband Gordon Crews, also a professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Marshall University,  and Catherine Burton, associate professor of Criminal Justice at The Citadel.  

“To prevent school violence, society must first address troubled youth who have easy access to weapons,” the authors wrote, calling the NRA’s ideas “superficially simple” with risks of negative consequences.

The NRA, they also wrote, has presented itself as a “seemingly ready-made provider of all things necessary for the level of school security required for the safety of children.”

In their piece, the criminologists echo juvenile-court judges and others who are concerned that putting more police into schools – for the purpose of protecting students – could end up needlessly referring  more students to the criminal-justice system for minor reasons.

The criminologists also warn that schools will take on substantial criminal and civil liability risks if they rush to hire security guards with insufficient vetting or allow staff to carry arms once they’ve had training certified by the NRA or another entity.

“The potential for that liability looms large for anyone who ‘certifies’ that another person knows how, and more importantly, when to fire a weapon,” the article says.

The NRA task force’s “model security plans,” the article also says, calls for costly security investments that would “potentially only serve to increase profits for those invested in security industries.”

Crews said she found it troubling that most of the 13 members of the “National School Shield Task Force” are affiliated with security advisory or design businesses that could stand to profit from schools seeking more security infrastructure.

“Comprising a task force primarily of representatives from two private consulting firms is highly suspect, especially when most, if not all of the members seem to be connected with government and/or private security endeavors,” Crews told the Center for Public Integrity. 

“If we were forming such a task force, we would have consulted mainly experts in violent juvenile criminal behavior, experts in K-12 education, and experts in juvenile mental health. These people come mainly from military, governmental or private security backgrounds,” she said.

The NRA did not respond to requests for comment.

Hutchinson, at his press event, called the security professionals experts in their field who were best equipped to study schools’ vulnerabilities. 

Two security advisory businesses, Command Consulting Group and Phoenix RBT Solutions, have been open about their executives’ participation in the NRA’s 13-member task force.

Neither firm responded to request for comment on the questions Crews raised about possible conflicts of interest. However, on the Command Consulting Group website, the businesses jointly announced their executives’ participation in the NRA’s task force and explained that they were already working with schools and school police with training and to improve security needs.

“Our team was proud to contribute in identifying current vulnerabilities and best practices for schools,” task force member Ralph Basham, former director of the U.S. Secret Service and a founder of Command Consulting Group, says on the website.

Anthony Lambraia, owner of Phoenix RBT Solutions and also a member of the task force, is quoted on the Command Consulting Group website as saying: “The time to effect change in school safety programs is long overdue. We’ve provided training programs guidelines and a best practices manual that offers actionable steps that can be taken to address school safety concerns.”

The NRA task force report suggests making school security funds available from the Department of Homeland Security; traditionally, most federal dollars for such programs have come through grant programs operated by the U.S. Justice and Education Departments.

“It is recommended that the Department of Homeland Security grants should be open for school security programs such as training, risk assessment and security response planning. This would not involve any additional federal funds, but would open up schools as a potential recipient of the Homeland Security grants,” the NRA task fund report says.

(In response to the Newtown killings, the Obama Administration is requesting $150 million for schools to hire more police or counselors or purchase other security needs. The money would be administrated mostly through the Education and Justice departments, with officials saying that it would be contingent upon schools agreeing to Justice Department-approved training of police on how to work in a school environment.)  

Hutchinson, the task force director, said the group’s conclusions were “independent” of the NRA, which paid for the $1 million effort to scrutinize school safety at various locations. The task force dropped the NRA’s initial idea of persuading schools to recruit armed volunteers to protect schools that couldn’t afford guards.

But the task force report argues that having at least one armed guard or employee in every school could deter an attack or prevent mass killings.

The report released Tuesday contains “model legislation” legislators could draw from to change state laws so that school employees could carry licensed and concealed weapons at schools. A number of states, such as Mississippi, are already debating bills that were fashioned in consultation with NRA representatives.  

Crews, who is conducting a national study of school shooters, told the Center that the research raises serious questions about staff members bringing weapons onto school grounds and carrying or storing them there.

“Ongoing research that we are conducting with incarcerated perpetrators of school violence also indicates that school shooters have easy access to weapons, often getting them — either as gifts or stealing them — from their parents, neighbors or friends who may have purchases them legally,” Crews said. “Putting more weapons in schools just makes more weapons available because inevitably, someone will forget to lock their drawer, misplace their key, or otherwise lose track of their firearm, making it easy for kids who want to have one to take it.”

The tangled trail of the Magnitsky Affair, a case that’s strained U.S.-Russian relations and blocked American adoptions of Russian orphans, snakes through an offshore haven in the Caribbean. 

The death of Moscow tax attorney Sergei Magnitsky sparked international outrage. It also fueled a push to unravel secret deals that had prompted him to claim that gangsters and government insiders had stolen $230 million from Russia’s treasury.

Magnitsky and other private attorneys investigating the affair on behalf of a major hedge fund followed a path from Russia to bank accounts in Switzerland and luxury properties in Dubai — ending up at a small firm based in the British Virgin Islands that specializes in setting up offshore companies for clients who want to remain in the shadows.

This is the story of behind-the-scenes players in the Magnitsky affair — and the tale of how an offshore go-between provided shelter to fraudsters, money launderers and other shady characters from Russia, Eastern Europe and the United States.

Click through to ICIJ.org to continue reading.

MORE IN THIS SERIES

• François Hollande’s Campaign Treasurer’s Investments in the Cayman Islands
• Caribbean Go-Between Provided Shelter for Far-Away Frauds, Documents Show
• Philippine Government to Probe Marcos Daughter’s Offshore Trust
• Deutsche Bank Helped Customers Maintain Hundreds of Offshore Entities
• Who Uses the Offshore World
• Elites Undermine Putin Rail Against Tax Havens
• Ponzi Scheme Used Offshore Hideaways To Shuffle Investors’ Money
• Taxmen Have Little Clue of Offshore Companies Owned by Greeks
• Map: Key Tax Haven Clients In the World
• Ferdinand Marcos’ Daughter Tied to Offshore Trust in Caribbean
• Disclosure of secret offshore documents may force top Mongolian lawmaker to resign
• How ICIJ’s Project Team Analyzed the Offshore Files
• Canadian Senator's Husband Shifted Money Into Offshore Tax Havens
• Offshore companies provide link between corporate mogul and Azerbaijan’s president
• Interactive: Gunter Sachs' Offshore Network
• 'Crony' of African Strongman Among Thai Names in Secret Offshore Files
• Interactive: Stash Your Cash
• Mega-Rich Use Tax Havens to Buy and Sell Masterpieces
• Key Findings
• Secret Files Expose Offshore’s Global Impact
• About This Project: Secrecy For Sale
• Nominee Directors Linked to Intelligence, Military
• Cosmetic surgery tycoon had secret offshore company
• Britons Snapped Up Luxury Villas on Thai Island
• Post-Soviet Billionaires Invade UK ... Via British Virgin Islands
• Interactive: We Reveal Who's Buying Up Britain
• Who’s Buying Britain? Probe Reveals Real Estate Speculators Hidden By Offshore Alchemy
• One Block in London, Many Secret Owners
• Video: How To Dodge Tax
• Front Men Disguise the Offshore Game's Real Players
• ‘Fatal Blow’ Against Sham Corporate Directors Not So Fatal After All
• Meet the Queen of Nevis
• British Virgin Islands Well-Known for Sunny Beaches – and Strict Secrecy
• How the nominee trick works
• Inside the shell: Drugs, arms and tax scams

Texan Ron Paul's congressional career is over, but he's still helping himself from his well-stocked campaign account.

On March 11, the Committee to Re-Elect Ron Paul donated $150,000 to the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, a nonprofit charitable group Paul himself founded in 1976, according to documents filed today with the Federal Election Commission. Carol Paul, his wife, is the group's president, Internal Revenue Service documents show.

The Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, which shares a Texas address with Paul's congressional committee, describes itself as "dedicated to individual liberty and free-market economics." It is also the publisher of "Ron Paul's Freedom Report," a periodic newsletter.

Additionally, it this year is publishing Paul's wonky weekly column, the most recent of which focused on the financial meltdown of Cyprus. Paul, long a backer of a gold standard and currency competition, used it to deride the island nation's "fiat paper money system combined with fractional reserve banking" and advocate that the United States "end the Federal Reserve, stay away from propping up the euro and return to a sound monetary system."

The Foundation for Rational Economics and Education's most recent filing with the Internal Revenue Service lists assets of nearly $653,000 at the beginning of 2011, up from the more than $564,000 a year earlier. Like other nonprofits, the foundation is not required to disclose its donors on its IRS filings.

By law, political campaign committees may contribute unlimited surplus funds to 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofits such as the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, and there's no prohibition on a former candidate directing those funds to his or her own charity.

With the $150,000 contribution to his nonprofit, Paul has all but tapped out his congressional account, which reported about $27,300 cash on hand as of the end of March, federal filings show.

But Paul's 2012 presidential campaign committee reported nearly $1.1 million in available cash and no debt through December, according to its most recent filing with the FEC.

It may soon be known what, if anything, it has done with this leftover cash. The committee has until April 15 to file its next financial report, as the FEC in January approved its request to change its filing frequency from monthly to quarterly.

Paul, a libertarian-leaning Republican, left Congress in January after failing to win the 2012 Republican presidential nomination and opting against seeking re-election to his Houston-area U.S. House seat.

The Center for Public Integrity’s international team has just launched the largest investigative reporting project in its 15 year history.

Drawing on a leaked cache of 2.5 million files, ICIJ has cracked open the secrets of more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts and about 130,000 individuals and agents, exposing hidden dealings of politicians, con men and the mega-rich in more than 170 countries and territories all over the world. 

ICIJ stands for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, an elite group of 160 investigative reporters in 60 countries that is a long-standing initiative of The Center for Public Integrity. The offshore tax haven project has so far involved some 89 journalists in 46 countries, and growing.

This leaked offshore information totaled more than 260 gigabytes of data — about the same amount of information as would be found in half a million books. I believe this may be the largest amount of leaked data ever gathered and analyzed by journalists. ICIJ’s research involved using high-tech data crunching and shoe-leather reporting to sift through corporate documents, emails, account ledgers and other files covering nearly 30 years. Alongside perfectly legal transactions, the secrecy and lax oversight offered by the offshore world allows fraud, tax dodging and political corruption to thrive.

To analyze the documents, ICIJ collaborated with journalists from The Guardian and the BBC in the U.K., Le Monde in France, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Germany, The Washington Post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and 31 other media partners around the world.

If you want to understand why the trillions of dollars in offshore accounts are such a critical issue for every country and the global economy, read this investigation — the most transparent and illuminating look ever into the secret world of tax havens and the people who make use of them. 

The two most prolific outside spending groups in state elections have found a new method for influencing elections and ballot initiatives — nonprofit groups.

As reported by the Center for Public Integrity on Thursday, the Washington, D.C.-based Republican Governors Association and Democratic Governors Association together have poured tens of millions of dollars of secret money into nonprofits to wage state-level battles over union rights, tax policy, gay marriage and, of course, gubernatorial seats.

The two nonprofit groups — the RGA’s Republican Governors Association Public Policy Committee and the DGA’s America Works USA — are not required to make their donors public, giving these contributors a secret avenue for funding RGA and DGA efforts.

The Internal Revenue Service, however, incorrectly released donor information for the RGA nonprofit, which the Center obtained.

The disclosure reveals several high-profile corporate executives and two healthcare giants supporting the RGA nonprofit’s efforts in 2011.

“Social welfare” nonprofits are not supposed to have a primary purpose of engaging in politics, according to IRS rules. But this has not stopped political operatives from using the groups to influence elections at all levels, and the RGA and DGA are no exception.

During 2011 and the first half of 2012, the DGA nonprofit America Works USA spent 70 percent of its budget on ads in gubernatorial races in West Virginia and Missouri, according to IRS records.

The RGA nonprofit, Republican Governors Association Public Policy Committee, promised the IRS it would spend only 20 percent of its resources on advertisements, but by 2011, had spent 50 percent of its budget on advertisements.

Spending by the RGA and DGA nonprofits has exploded in just two years and is poised to keep rising as 38 governors’ seats go up for grabs this year and next.

Full coverage:

• IRS ‘outs’ handful of donors to Republican group
• Governors’ groups rely increasingly on 'dark money' affiliates
• Documents: DGA and RGA federal tax filings

With April 15 approaching, some small business owners who provide health coverage to their workers are not going to be as indebted to Uncle Sam as they have in years past, thanks to Obamacare. That’s right, thanks to Obamacare.

Mike Roach, owner of Paloma Clothing, a women’s clothing store in Portland, Oregon, is among them. He is one of several hundred thousand small employers who have taken advantage of a provision of the reform law that provides a substantial tax credit to companies that offer health insurance to their employees. And not only is Roach able to save money, now that he’s offering coverage, he’s no longer losing valued employees to large department stores that have long provided benefits as a recruitment tool.

Roach had always wanted to offer coverage to his 12 employees but had found the premiums too steep. He said the message he kept getting from insurance companies was, “We don’t really want your business, but we will do business with you as long as we can gouge you.”

Small businesses like his have always had to pay considerably more for the same coverage as large employers. At big companies with hundreds or thousands of workers, insurers’ and employers’ risk is spread across a much larger “pool” of people. A few employees getting sick or injured in a given year at a big company would have a negligible effect on the risk pool.

Not so at a shop like Roach’s with just a dozen workers. Small business owners pay more because underwriters at insurance companies know that if just one worker at a small business gets sick, the insurer could wind up losing money on the account. Small businesses also lack the bargaining power of large firms.

As a consequence, more and more small companies have dropped coverage in recent years while big employers have continued to offer it.

“Not offering health insurance puts a small business like ours us at a distinct disadvantage,” said Roach, “especially when you consider that we are competing to have the best employees we can have to provide the best customer service against crack competitors like Nordstrom’s.”

So when he heard that the Affordable Care Act makes tax credits available to small employers that offer coverage, he talked with his accountant, who told him that the tax credits would make coverage affordable—not cheap, but affordable—for the first time.

Another motivation: his store manager was considering taking a job with a competitor that offered benefits.

“We didn’t want to lose her, and she didn’t want to quit,” Roach said, but her husband had just lost his job. She needed to work for a company that offered coverage.

Roach decided to go for it. He now pays about $29,000 in premiums for his workers, but he has received tax credits that have averaged $5,000 over the past two years. And he’ll save even more next year.

Under the law, small businesses that employ fewer than 25 people whose average wages are less than $50,000 get a tax credit equivalent to 35 percent of the employers’ contribution to the workers’ premiums. It will go to 50 percent starting next year.

Also next year, companies with fewer than 100 employees will be able to buy coverage through the online health insurance marketplaces (referred to as exchanges in the ACA). This should make polices even more affordable because the exchanges will pool the purchasing power of small businesses together.  And starting next year, insurers will no longer be able to dramatically increase small business health insurance premiums because an employee got sick or older or because the business hired more women, who historically have been charged more than men.

Companies with fewer than 50 employees will not have to offer coverage, but Roach says he believes many if not most will do so once the exchanges are up and running and more employers learn of the tax credits.

“I would really encourage every business to take a serious look at it because if you can do it, you’re going to have a better workforce,” Roach said. “The employees you’re going to have are going to feel better about coming to work. They are more likely to stay with you, and they’re probably going to be more productive because they’re not going to have to worry as much about access to health care.”

Most small employers that provide coverage typically offer only one type of plan because offering multiple options increases administrative costs. That, too, will change, thanks to the exchanges, meaning that employees like Mike Roach’s will eventually be able to choose among competing plans just like employees at many large firms. The effective date of that change was originally scheduled to be January 1, 2014, but the Department of Health and Human Services is considering delaying it for a year. Even if it is delayed, though, many small business employees already are getting employer-subsidized coverage for the first time. And companies like Paloma Clothing are finally on a more level playing field with their bigger competitors.

On November 14, 2006, a man going by the name Paul William Hampel was arrested at a Canadian airport on charges of being a Russian spy.

Hampel’s carefully constructed identity portrayed him as a successful businessman, yet for a decade his company did no business.

Only months before his capture, the same apparatus used to create his alias was also employed by a very different spy agency - the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency —to build a secret prison in Lithuania, where U.S. agents interrogated suspected al-Qaeda terrorists.

Earlier again, it was used by the regime of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to cheat the Oil for Food program.

All three deceptions employed a common subterfuge: far-flung corporate entities used as anonymous fronts, with “executives” who lacked knowledge of what the firms were up to.

The activities of these so-called nominee directors are a little noticed part of the world of secretive offshore finance that’s grown so vast that it touches more than 170 of the globe’s 206 countries, but it’s one that’s often drenched in intrigue.

For a fee as low as $90, men and women who often appear to have little or no formal business qualifications lend their names as directors to enterprises they later can claim to know nothing about - even after those enterprises are linked to everything from stock fraud to money laundering.

Click through to ICIJ.org to continue reading.

MORE IN THIS SERIES

• François Hollande’s Campaign Treasurer’s Investments in the Cayman Islands
• Caribbean Go-Between Provided Shelter for Far-Away Frauds, Documents Show
• Philippine Government to Probe Marcos Daughter’s Offshore Trust
• Deutsche Bank Helped Customers Maintain Hundreds of Offshore Entities
• Who Uses the Offshore World
• Elites Undermine Putin Rail Against Tax Havens
• Ponzi Scheme Used Offshore Hideaways To Shuffle Investors’ Money
• Taxmen Have Little Clue of Offshore Companies Owned by Greeks
• Map: Key Tax Haven Clients In the World
• Ferdinand Marcos’ Daughter Tied to Offshore Trust in Caribbean
• Disclosure of secret offshore documents may force top Mongolian lawmaker to resign
• How ICIJ’s Project Team Analyzed the Offshore Files
• Canadian Senator's Husband Shifted Money Into Offshore Tax Havens
• Offshore companies provide link between corporate mogul and Azerbaijan’s president
• Interactive: Gunter Sachs' Offshore Network
• 'Crony' of African Strongman Among Thai Names in Secret Offshore Files
• Interactive: Stash Your Cash
• Mega-Rich Use Tax Havens to Buy and Sell Masterpieces
• Key Findings
• Secret Files Expose Offshore’s Global Impact
• About This Project: Secrecy For Sale
• Nominee Directors Linked to Intelligence, Military
• Cosmetic surgery tycoon had secret offshore company
• Britons Snapped Up Luxury Villas on Thai Island
• Post-Soviet Billionaires Invade UK ... Via British Virgin Islands
• Interactive: We Reveal Who's Buying Up Britain
• Who’s Buying Britain? Probe Reveals Real Estate Speculators Hidden By Offshore Alchemy
• One Block in London, Many Secret Owners
• Video: How To Dodge Tax
• Front Men Disguise the Offshore Game's Real Players
• ‘Fatal Blow’ Against Sham Corporate Directors Not So Fatal After All
• Meet the Queen of Nevis
• British Virgin Islands Well-Known for Sunny Beaches – and Strict Secrecy
• How the nominee trick works
• Inside the shell: Drugs, arms and tax scams

The National Collegiate Athletic Association's "March Madness" will come to an end tonight as the University of Louisville's Division I men's basketball team faces off against the University of Michigan in Atlanta. But the game of politics won't stop for the NCAA's lobbyists.

The NCAA has employed in-house lobbyists since 1995. During the past decade, it has spent about $1.6 million on lobbying, including $150,000 in 2012 alone, according to records filed with the U.S. Senate.

Two lobbyists have worked to advance the NCAA's interests: Abe Frank, a veteran of Citigroup's government relations shop, and Edgar Burch.

The lobbyists spend "a significant amount of their time" on "educational efforts," NCAA spokeswoman Stacey Osburn told the Center for Public Integrity.

Last year, the NCAA's top concerns included legislation related to the safety of athletes, bills to legalize betting on athletic competitions (which the organization opposes) and the "overflight ban on general aviation aircraft flying over large stadiums," records indicate.

The NCAA conducts 89 national championships in 23 sports. The "Frozen Four" tournament for men's Division I hockey will be held later this week in Pittsburgh.

Researchers analyzing a trove of national school discipline data have found that as black, disabled and English-as-a-second language students enter middle and high schools, their school suspension rates start soaring – a serious predicator for dropping out.  

Even one or two out-of-school suspensions are now linked by multiple studies to a greater risk of a student dropping out, suffering “failure” and being incarcerated, researchers for the University of California at Los Angeles Civil Rights Project said Monday at a Capitol Hill briefing.

“Perhaps the most disturbing finding is that nationally, on average, 36 percent of black male students with disabilities enrolled in middle and high schools were suspended at least once in (the) 2009-2010 (academic year),” researchers wrote in their report, “Out of School & Off Track: The Overuse of Suspensions in American Middle and High Schools.”

The study also found that across the nation, one in every four African-American students in secondary schools was suspended at least once in the 2009-2010 academic year. One in every five students with disabilities and one in every five English-language learners was also suspended, out of school, at least once. That’s compared to only one in 16 white students without disabilities receiving at least one suspension over the same time period.  

For their report, researchers analyzed data on suspensions for the 2009-2010 school year gathered from schools for the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Database.

The report identifies 10 districts with the largest number of “hot spot” secondary schools with relatively large numbers of suspensions.  A  large number is defined as having 25 percent or more of all students in one or more of any subgroup, such as students of a certain ethnicity or students with disabilities, getting suspended in one year.  

Chicago had the highest number – 82 -- of high-suspending hot pot secondary schools in the nation. Among those students identified at particular risk:  black males with disabilities in the Chicago Public Schools District, in Saint Paul (Minn.) Public Schools and in the Los Angeles Unified School District.  (Los Angeles Unified struck an agreement in 2011 with the U.S. Department of Education to embrace other methods of discipline considered more successful than removal of students.) 

 “There is something absolutely wrong,” when students are removed at these levels, said Dan Losen, an author of the analysis and director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies, an initiative of UCLA’s Civil Rights Project.  

High suspensions of disabled students are “just shocking when you think of the federal (disabled students) funds that have gone to support those schools, along with matching state funds,” said Diane Smith Howard, staff attorney for juvenile justice and education issues for National Disability Rights Network. She spoke on a conference call about the report’s findings.

Forty years ago, in 1972-73, according to the report, about 12 percent of black secondary students were suspended, out of school, at least once. Today that figure has reached 24 percent for all black students nationally.

Researchers also found that that the troubled Los Angeles Unified School District contained schools with similar student demographics that reported far lower rates of suspensions. That suggested, Losen said, that educational leaders at those individual campuses could provide help colleagues with “viable alternatives” to manage classrooms.

As the Center for Public Integrity has reported, the Los Angeles Unified School District also shows that students at some middle and high school campuses are also issued exceptionally high numbers of citations from school police for misbehavior, including fights and disruption by junior high students ticketed under the criminal label of “disturbing the peace.”

Losen said that high suspension rates are “an early warning system” at particular schools that should suggest school administrators need to make changes in how they manage  behavior.

The suspensions data the report contains, Losen said, could be used to predict “drop-out factories” because middle schools with high suspension rates often are the source of students who go on to attend high schools with high suspension and drop-out rates.

“This is not a game of gotcha,” Losen said of the findings. He said parents, district leaders and administrators can use the Civil Rights Project’s studies and analyses to find schools within a district that might provide answers in terms of initiatives that help keep students engaged in school and improve behavior. 

 The report released Monday notes research indicating that being suspended even once in ninth grade is associated with a two-fold increase in the likelihood of dropping out. “The high number of students suspended, as presented in this report, should be of grave concern to all parents, educators, taxpayers and policymakers,” Losen and his colleagues wrote. 

Researchers have posted data for 26,000 middle and high schools that can be searched online. The investigation was supported, in part, by Atlantic Philanthropies and the California Endowment. (The Center for Public Integrity receives funding for independent reporting from the California Endowment.)

At the Capitol briefing, Losen and others involved in research on suspension suggested that federal grants to schools could be made contingent upon efforts to reduce suspensions or employ them as a last resort. Losen said researchers are not suggesting that suspensions never be imposed. 

Ivory Toldson, an associate professor of counseling psychology at Howard University, said Monday that school administrators sometimes engage in “bait and switch” when asked to respond to why they have high suspension rates. “They talk about the kid who stabbed a kid,” he said. But most suspensions, he said, are for unspecified low-level misbehavior that can be addressed in other ways.

Researchers also said that schools often feel the pressure to meet testing standards and might be tempted to remove lower-performing and troubled students.

This month marks the beginning of one of the biggest financial leaks in history.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has just released the first stories from a global collaborative project into the world of offshore money. The Tax Justice Network, an advocacy group claims that a third of the world’s wealth is tied up in the secret area of offshore.

For the past 15 months, journalists from over 40 countries have worked together to shed light on this issue.

And here’s some of what they found:

• Scandal-buffeted Pakistani politician Moonis Elahi, whose father Chaudhry Pervez Elahi has just stepped down as deputy prime minister, owned a secret company in the British Virgin Islands. The company's existence wasn't unearthed during a recent government probe into Moonis Elahi involving illegal payments in an alleged land scam. 
   
• Top Malaysian politicians and their families, including former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad's son Mirzan and current cabinet minister Raja Nong Chik Zainal Abidin, are among prominent Malaysians with secretive offshore companies housed in Singapore and the British Virgin Islands. 
   
• "You’re certainly going to be using a nominee director if you’re doing anything bad," says university professor Jason Sharman. The CIA, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the company which shipped arms to Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, the former Kazakhstan banking head Mukhtar Ablyazov, and alleged spy Paul William Hampel are some of the clients who have used nominee directors and offshore entities to conceal their activities and identities.
   
• Among the 4,000 U.S. individuals listed in the records, at least 30 are American citizens accused in lawsuits or criminal cases of fraud, money laundering or other serious financial misconduct, an analysis by the Washington Post and ICIJ found. Offshore trusts and companies set up in the South Pacific and Caribbean are the common factor in several prominent financial scandals in the U.S.
   
• Offshore companies are ridiculously easy to establish, and effective at concealing your identity. Watch our animated video explaining the process.
   

• Two major French banks, BNP Paribas and Crédit Agricole oversaw the creation of a large number of totally opaque offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands, Samoa and Singapore from the late 1990s until the end of the 2000s for clients in search of secrecy and lower tax rates.
   
• Nicky Hager provides an in-depth look at the offshore service provider Portcullis TrustNet. Roughly 45,000 of about 77,000 of the client list come from China, Taiwan, Singapore and other East and Southeast Asian nations. The firm is used by many of the world’s major banks, such as UBS, Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse subsidiary Clariden, and by the world’s biggest auditing firms, such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte and KPMG, to provide secrecy for their wealthy clients, and was implicated in New Zealand’s "winebox affair" scandal of the decade.
   
• Gunter Sachs, the late millionaire playboy, businessman and former husband of Bridgette Bardot is revealed to have had an intricate offshore scheme to manage his vast fortune, a scheme that remained inscrutable to the fiscal authorities until the end.
   
• Two Americans and one South African are revealed to have reaped $2.5 million dollars from the aborted sales of surplus military helicopters to President Lissouba during the civil war in the Republic of Congo.
   
• François Hollande’s treasurer during the 2012 presidential campaign, businessman Jean-Jacques Augier, is revealed to have investments in the Cayman Islands.
•  Philippine government officials said Friday that they will look into the disclosure that Maria Imelda Marcos Manotoc, the eldest daughter of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos was a beneficiary of a secret offshore trust in the British Virgin Islands. “We are duty bound to investigate and, depending upon informed preliminary findings, decide whether to pursue the matter,” said Andres Bautista, the chairman of the Presidential Commission on Good Government, tasked with recovering the Marcos family’s alleged ill-gotten wealth.
   
•  Germany’s largest financial institution, Deutsche Bank, helped its customers maintain more than 300 secretive offshore companies and trusts through its Singapore branch.
   
• New light is shed on a half-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme  in Venezuela that shuffled investor money among a maze of offshore companies, hedge funds and bank accounts stretching from the Cayman Islands to Switzerland and Panama, smoothing the way by funneling bribes to officials in Venezuela.
   
• Commonwealth Trust Limited, a BVI-based firm, is revealed to have set up companies involved in the Magnitsky affair, a case that’s strained U.S.-Russian relations and blocked American adoptions of Russian orphans
• One of Mongolia’s most senior politicians says he is considering resigning from office after being confronted with evidence that he has an offshore company and a secret Swiss bank account.
   
• Newly uncovered documents link Maria Imelda Marcos Manotoc, the eldest child of the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and now a senior political figure in her own right, to two secretive offshore trusts and an offshore company.
   
• A prominent Canadian lawyer, husband to a Liberal senator, moved CA$1.7 million (US$1.1 million) to secretive financial havens while he was locked in battle with the Canada Revenue Agency over his taxes, according to documents in a massive leak of offshore financial data.
   
• A corporate mogul whose business empire has won building contracts worth billions of dollars amid Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s massive construction spree is tied to the president’s family through secretive offshore companies.
   
• The prominent Thais listed in secret documents as owners of offshore holdings includes the former wife of ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a sitting senator, a former high-ranking defense ministry official, Forbes-listed tycoons, and a former government minister whose assets in the United States are frozen because of her alleged links to Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe.  
   
• Greek citizens who own or direct offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands and other tax havens rarely declare them to Greek tax officials, a review of more than 100 companies shows. Just four out of 107 offshore companies investigated by ICIJ are registered with tax authorities as the law usually requires, particularly when the firms hold assets or conduct business in Greece. Officials apparently have no record of the other 103 firms — or whether the owners declared any assets held by these entities or paid taxes on them.
   
• A list containing examples of some of the most high-profile names uncovered in this investigation, along with records of their offshore companies. Those named come in the form of politicians, businessmen, army generals, tycoons, relatives of dictators, and are scattered across 29 different countries.
   
• Finally, for those interested in how ICIJ managed to tackle records cache, the data manager of the project, Duncan Campbell, writes an in-depth explanation of how our journalists were able make sense of the 260 gigabytes of information obtained. Four large databases, half a million text, PDF, spreadsheet, image and web files were dissected to reveal over 130,000 records on the people and agents who run, own, benefit from or hide behind offshore companies. 

• How one Zurich-based law firm, Lenz & Staehlin, has aided some of Europe's richest families park their wealth offshore. “People don’t set up this kind of structure out of altruism, but to gain a profit,” says Christian Wanner, one of Switzerland’s leading authorities on tax collection.

We hope you enjoy these stories; there will be more to follow daily for the next couple of weeks.

If you have story tips, documents or other information about this issue, contact us at investigations@icij.org.