The Passport Papers, a joint investigation by Maltese media houses, including Lovin Malta, and the Daphne Caruana Galizia foundation has been shortlisted for the 2022 Investigative Journalism for Europe Impact Award.

The investigation, which was published in April 2021, focused on material provided to Daphne Caruana GaliziaDaphne Caruana Galizia by a whistleblower about the IIP scheme.

It was a collaborative effort led by the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation and included Lovin Malta The Shift, The Times of Malta, Malta Today, The Malta Independent, The Guardian, The Dossier Center, and freelance journalist and filmmaker Safa al-Ahmad

After the journalist’s assassination, her family tried to contact the whistleblower but they had no name or contact. They eventually resurfaced and were willing to share the evidence about the IIP that would become the basis of the Passport Papers investigation.

In 2020, the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation was awarded funding from the Digital Defenders Partnership that allowed them to create the technical infrastructure needed to host the data.

A small technical team at the Foundation began processing the data in August 2020, and a small team of researchers at the Foundation began analysing it in December 2020.

The investigation took months to complete with Lovin Malta revealing written evidence of a business relationship between Henley & Partners, the global citizenship firm behind Malta’s Individual Investor Programme, and the people behind the now-defunct controversial big data firm Cambridge Analytica.

Henley & Partners said that it has no knowledge of any such formal relationship and that any agreements were never formalised and implemented.

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