Brazil: Open data just made investigating corruption easier - Transparency International
lterrat's bookmarks 2017-05-13
Summary:
"All of the official documentation of legal suits from Brazil’s biggest corruption scandal – Operation Car Wash or Lava Jato – is now available to search easily online. This will make it easier for investigators and ordinary citizens to find out who has been implicated in the scandal, even if they don’t hit the headlines. It’s a way to make sure the corrupt don’t try to hide their misdeeds.
The new tool is called Lava JOTA. It was developed by the Brazilian journalism start up JOTA, which specialises in covering judicial systems and procedures, and Digesto, a company that works on legal big data, in partnership with Transparency International. There are literally hundreds of thousands of documents online that relate to more than 1,100 lawsuits.
It’s easy to use and already popular: in the first month after its launch in April it received more than 150,000 visitors who carried out 55,000 searches. So far the most popular search term are for two former Brazilian presidents: Dilma Rousseff and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dominicana, or Dominican Republic, whose leading politicians have also been implicated in the scandal.
The Lava Jato operation started as an investigation in 2014 into corruption at Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned energy giant, but quite quickly spread to other state-owned enterprise and private sector contractors involved in projects both at the federal and regional level.
It is now three years old, and has led to investigations into hundreds of politicians, including a third of current President Michel Temer's cabinet, a third of Senate as well as dozens of members of the Lower House of Congress, governors and former politicians."