The 2021 Blueprint Whistleblowing Prize Winners: Undaunted Courage

Clockwise from top left: Daniel Hale, Jonathan Taylor, Francois van der Westhuizen, Pieter Snyders, Paul Hopkins, Thabiso Zulu, Babita Deokaran, Pav Gill, Margaret Mitchell, Daniel Ellsberg

There’s the most famous of them: one who reported the killings of civilians by US military drones; another detained after reporting corruption at an oil company; three who provided evidence that their tobacco company bribed African officials; one who spoke up against race and gender inequity at Google; and a lawyer who brought down a house of cards at a German financial company.

Then there are two South Africans who risked their lives to expose corruption. One was killed for reporting fraudulent contracts for COVID-19 personal protective equipment for health care workers, the other was targeted for assassination for reporting looting and bribery by municipal officials, and was forced into hiding in fear of his life.

They are the winners of the 2021 Blueprint Whistleblower Prizes.

DANIEL HALE – 2021 Blueprint International Whistleblowing Prize

A descendant of Nathan Hale, who was executed for spying on the British for the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, Daniel Hale was sentenced to 45 months in prison for revealing that US military drones in Afghanistan mostly killed innocent civilians.

He said he followed his conscience after learning some of the strikes had killed children – not terrorists – and, like his ancestor, he had no regrets about doing what he did. “I have but this one life to give in service of my country,” he said.

For his service to humanity, he is the winner of the 2021 Blueprint International Whistleblowing Prize.

Hale is a former National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence analyst who also served in the US Air Force and was assigned to the Joint Special Operations Command at Bagram Airfield, the largest US military base in Afghanistan.

His job was to identify targets for assassination.

After leaving the Air Force and becoming a contractor at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, he leaked 17 classified documents to the online news publication, The Intercept. They contained details about US kill lists and civilian casualties from drone strikes.

In August 2014, the FBI raided his home in Virginia, in what he described as retribution for his political activism. But it wasn’t until 2019 that he was charged with disclosing intelligence information and theft of government property – the documents exposing the deaths of innocents.

He stood by his principles and in March this year, he pleaded guilty to retaining and transmitting national defense information, and was sentenced to prison for being a whistleblower.

The Washington Post reported that he told a federal judge what moved him to blow the whistle was a fatal drone attack he had watched from a base in Afghanistan that he and his colleagues thought was a success at the time, but which he only discovered afterwards had led to innocent people being killed.

“I believe that it is wrong to kill, but it is especially wrong to kill the defenseless,” he told the  court. He shared what “was necessary to dispel the lie that drone warfare keeps us safe, that our lives are worth more than theirs.”

“You had to kill part of your conscience to keep doing your job,” he said  

In August 2021 he received the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence, eponymously named after a Vietnam War-era whistleblower for “performing a vital public service at great personal cost – imprisonment for truth-telling”.

A group of First Amendment and media law scholars wrote to the court in support of Hale, calling him “a classic whistleblower, who acted in good faith to alert the public of secret government policies that deserved to be debated by the citizens in a truly functioning democracy”.

JONATHAN TAYLOR – 2021 Blueprint UK Whistleblowing Prize

Jonathan Taylor’s case mirrored what many whistleblowers will find when they report wrongdoing, only to find that they become the targets of retaliation from the rich and the powerful.

He alerted the authorities to large-scale, systematic corruption in the oil industry. His disclosures led to criminal prosecutions and multi-million dollar fines being levied in four countries. Rather than being hailed as a whistleblower, he was trapped for nearly a year in Croatia after he was picked up on an Interpol red notice issued in Monaco, where his former company was based.

What happened to Taylor exposed the weaknesses of the European Union’s system of  whistleblower legislation protections. EU member states have until 17 December this year to implement a whistleblower directive, but so far only two have done so.

It also showed how proceedings for extraditions and the issuing of Interpol red notices, which take place outside legal frameworks for whistleblower protection, can be exploited to harm those who speak out in the public interest.

Taylor’s former company, SBM Offshore, is a major player in the international oil industry. The company manufactures and leases floating platforms and other infrastructure that makes offshore oil drilling possible – a lucrative business if the right contracts are won.

He worked for the company for nine years in Monaco as an in-house lawyer before becoming aware in 2012 of evidence of bribes being paid in Equatorial Guinea, including a series of payments to the son of that country’s president, Teodoro Obiang.

This was the first in a series of actions that would uncover a multimillion dollar bribery network spanning four continents. After being asked to investigate, he quickly discovered the problem was systemic, and that paying bribes was the way his employers did business.

He took his findings to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and left SBM shortly thereafter. The company was hit with multi-million dollar settlements with law enforcement agencies in the United States, the Netherlands, Brazil and Switzerland, and has paid $840 million in fines so far.

Several of SBM’s executives and intermediaries have been convicted of corruption-related offenses in the United States, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. Some are currently serving prison sentences.

It is unclear that any of this would have happened had Jonathan Taylor not taken action to prevent the company from covering its tracks.

For exposing a web of corruption and bribery, Taylor was subjected to retaliation by his former employer, with his own government reluctant to intervene and help him.

Several years after he made his disclosures, Taylor moved back to the UK. But in 2020 he was arrested when he arrived at Dubrovnik airport for a family holiday in Croatia, thanks to an Interpol red notice issued in Manoco based on allegations made by his former employer.

Even after the red notice was withdrawn on the eve of a legal challenge, Taylor was left with no option but to stay in Croatia pending the resolution of his extradition case.

He lost his job and his marriage, his health suffered, he was under extreme psychological duress, he was detained and turned on by his own embassy, and he was committed to a psychiatric hospital against his will for 12 hours after being strapped to a bed and forcibly injected with an unknown substance.

An extradition order was granted by Croatia’s Supreme Court. Taylor was only able to leave the country with the intervention of Croatian Minister of Justice, Ivan Malenica, who formally rejected Monaco’s extradition request, overturning the court decision.

Despite successfully evading extradition, the threat of SBM’s criminal complaint remains in place. International travel is likely to be difficult for Taylor until it is resolved, although he went to Monaco in October to appear before an investigating judge and was allowed to leave.

British American Tobacco whistleblowers – Francois van der Westhuizen, Pieter Snyders and Paul Hopkins – 2021 Blueprint UK Whistlelower Prize

In an industry which for decades has tried to hide the deadly truth about smoking, whistleblowers have played a critical role in bringing out evidence of duplicity by major tobacco manufacturers.

As smoking declines in the US and Europe, sub-Saharan Africa has become an increasingly important market for tobacco companies, especially British American Tobacco (BAT).

The three winners of the 2021 Blueprint UK Whistleblowing Prize have shown the incredible lengths BAT has gone to in order to maintain its control of tobacco markets in Africa.

In two separate instances of whistleblowing, three people – Paul Hopkins from Kenya, and then Pieter Snyders and Francois van der Westhuizen from South Africa – presented evidence that the company carried out a consistent campaign of industrial espionage and sabotage against its commercial rivals on the African continent.

These activities were condoned by BAT and often conducted directly from their London headquarters. Under the Bribery Act (2011), British companies can be prosecuted for bribery carried out by their employees or agents anywhere in the world if they fail to take steps to prevent it.

In 2015, Hopkins, who worked for BAT in Kenya for 13 years, said the company had paid off  public officials and politicians in Kenya, Rwanda and Burundi. He provided documentary proof of bribes paid between 2008-13 to limit health measures and gather intelligence on local rivals, exposing a pattern of behaviour across the continent.

Researchers at the University of Bath’s Tobacco Control Project say they believe that Hopkins was “the most significant tobacco industry whistleblower for decades”. His disclosures led to an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office, which was however closed this year without prosecution.

But this year has seen further disclosures about BAT’s activities in South Africa and Zimbabwe. These involve a network of hundreds of paid informants, and the planned bribery of public officials and top politicians.

The BBC’s Panorama programme, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London and the University of Bath’s Tobacco Control Research Group have covered the story, drawing heavily on the testimony of whistleblowers and their documentation.

That came from Van der Westhuizen and Snyders, former employees of private security company Forensic Security Services (FSS), which was contracted by BAT to run the company’s “dirty tricks” campaign in South Africa.

The FSS whistleblowers detailed evidence of BAT’s use of planned bribery, surveillance and double agents to sabotage its smaller local rivals. The South African government’s Illicit Tobacco Task Team and State Security Agency worked closely with BAT’s local subsidiary and representatives of FSS.

The whistleblowers outlined what they described as a massive corporate espionage scheme, with an informant network of around 200 people, many of whom worked for BAT’s rivals and were paid for information about their employers to disrupt their business operations.

It was, they said, managed from BAT’s London headquarters, which ran the FSS contract but also paid informants of their own.

BAT’s contract with FSS ended in 2016. The UK’s Serious Fraud Office confirmed it is aware of the latest allegations. It has not, as yet, been in touch with either of the FSS whistleblowers. 

DANIEL ELLSBERG – 2021 Blueprint Lifetime Achievement Award

If there’s ever a pantheon for whistleblowers, Daniel Ellsberg will occupy pride of place for his pioneering role in empowering people to come forward to speak the truth and provide evidence of wrongdoing.

Arguably the most famous whistleblower in the world, his celebrity status was renewed this year – the 50th anniversary of the publication of a top-secret military report that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers.

The report documented a secret history of US political and military involvement in Vietnam over more than two decades against the backdrop of an escalating conflict.

A military analyst who had served in Vietnam, Ellsberg had worked on drafting the report. It showed the war in southeast Asia had been a disaster for years, above all for the Vietnamese, but also for the US.

His decision to leak the Pentagon Papers to the the New York Times was prompted in part by attending a conference hosted by the War Resisters League. One of the speakers was about to go to prison for resisting the military draft and refusing to be sent to fight in Vietnam.

“He put the question in my head: ‘What can I do to help end the war now that I am ready to go to prison for it?” Ellsberg said.

His action became a litmus test for the prosecution of whistleblowers who leak classified information in the public interest.

In an era without the kind of technology available today, such as USB drives and digital drop boxes, he had to photocopy 7,000 pages before slipping them to the newspaper, which carried a front page exposé that rocked the government of President Richard Nixon.

The government brought a legal suit to try to stop the publication of any more stories based on the Pentagon Papers. This was the first time in modern US history when the federal government sought to impose “prior restraint” on a newspaper to halt publication for national security reasons.

When the government was awarded a temporary restraining order against The Times, Ellsberg delivered the records to 18 other newspapers. This eventually led to a Supreme Court decision to uphold the right of newspapers to publish the story – a landmark ruling that has provided increased protection to free media in the US ever since.

The government then went after Ellsberg using the Espionage Act – which could be wielded against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange if he’s extradited from the United Kingdom for releasing evidence of deadly US military actions in Iraq.

Assange became the first journalist charged in the US simply for publishing information provided by whistleblowers. Newspapers that reproduced the evidence released by WikiLeaks – which the US government wanted to hide – were not prosecuted.

The judge in Ellsberg’s case eventually threw out the criminal charges because the “totality of the circumstances” surrounding the government’s criminal actions against him – the dirty tricks used – offended “a sense of justice”.

Since then, Ellsberg has spent the last half century attending protests and defending whistleblowers, continuing a lifetime of extraordinary service to the public.

MARGARET MITCHELL (United States) - 2021 SPECIAL RECOGNITION AWARD

The founder of Google’s ethical artificial intelligence team, Margaret Mitchell, and her colleagues conducted critical research in identifying and preventing bias in machine learning. But when she publicly opposed the mistreatment of the team’s co-lead, Timnit Gebru, and spoke out about race and gender inequity, she was fired.

Her treatment has highlighted the hazards whistleblowers in the tech industry face when courageously speaking out against ethical and human rights violations at their companies, even at the risk of retaliation.

Google released her on accusations of violating security policies by moving files outside the company. But her dismissal was really tied to the firing of Gebru, an Ethiopian-American researcher who is one of the world’s leading voices on AI bias, and an organiser for ethnic minority workers in her field.

At Google, Mitchell and Gebru were conducted research into introducing ethical safeguards and fairness into machine learning, but they found it difficult to bring their conclusions on bias to colleagues developing the company’s products.

They produced a toolkit for product teams that would help them assess when algorithms exaggerated particular tendencies in a way that might cause bias, especially with the development of so-called large language models.

These are machine learning systems that allow algorithms to use a very large amount of text, usually mined from the web, to train themselves.

In December 2020, Gebru was fired when she questioned an order not to publish a paper she had co-authored that cited studies on the dangers of large language models. One of the pitfalls identified was how biases found online could be replicated.

With advertising essential to Google's revenue, the company would not allow a critical literature review to be published with a company employee’s name on it.

Mitchell objected to the decision to fire Gebru, raised concerns about race and gender equity at the company, and looked for evidence of other instances of possible discrimination, including against Gebru. Soon afterwards, she was fired.

She said she believed it was because she was targeted as a whistleblower.  Thousands of Google employees and outside AI experts signed a petition condemning the company. Some, including a director who’d been at Google for 16 years, quit in protest.

A group of Google employees published a letter on Medium calling for laws to be strengthened that protected tech workers, including AI researchers, who wanted to become whistleblowers.

“Researchers and other tech workers need protections which allow them to call out harmful technology when they see it, and whistleblower protection can be a powerful tool for guarding against the worst abuses of the private entities which create these technologies,” the group, Google Walkout for Real Change, wrote.

Mitchell's stance put pressure on the board of Alphabet, which owns Google, to improve its whistleblower protections. Resistance in the company has remained, however. In June, a motion calling for an independent review of Google’s whistleblowing policy was voted down. But the case has highlighted growing concerns over the treatment of employees who blow the whistle on ethical and human rights violations in the tech sector.

PAV GILL (Singapore) – 2021 SPECIAL RECOGNITION AWARD

In his role as senior legal counsel in the Asia Pacific region for payments company Wirecard, Pav Gill blew the whistle on fraud and corruption.

Wirecard is a German financial services company that claimed to have revolutionalized the payments industry by allowing purchases to be made online almost instantaneously anywhere in the world for a small cut of each transaction.

The company grew rapidly from its beginnings in 1999. After initially focusing on payments in the adult entertainment and online gambling industries, the company expanded into the mainstream. It built a worldwide presence by aggressively acquiring companies abroad and adding offices in Dubai and in Singapore, where Gill worked.

By 2018 Wirecard was listed on the DAX index of Germany’s 40 leading companies, but it was illusion, a House of Wirecards built on fake contracts, falsified invoices and fabricated profits.

The end came in the summer of 2020, when the company announced it was 3.2 billion euros ($3.61 billion) in debt and filed for insolvency. It turned out about a quarter of Wirecard’s balance sheet didn’t exist. Senior figures at the company are now in custody, awaiting trial. Others are on the run.

After leaving the company, Gill provided the Financial Times with the information that finally exposed the biggest accounting fraud Germany had seen for a generation after Wirecard had avoided scrutiny through legal and extra-legal methods for years.

Germany’s regulators appeared dazzled by Wirecard’s success and prioritized investigating the company’s critics over assessing their claims. But Gill’s role as a whistleblower and the newspaper’s reporting eventually brought it down.

The newspaper and its journalists received threats from Wirecard’s lawyers as well as less conventional forms of intimidation. Wirecard executives sent messages to journalists identifying one of their sources, and there were suspicions that Wirecard executives were deliberately trying to feed false stories to the paper to make its reporting look unreliable.

Gill was the breakthrough.

He put himself at great risk by speaking out. As an in-house company lawyer, he was well positioned to provide critical information to blow apart the scam.

He had tried to draw attention to suspected fraud reported to him by colleagues, after he found the regional profit figures didn’t add up.

With two colleagues in compliance roles, he brought a Singapore legal firm on board to conduct an independent investigation. Within a couple of weeks, evidence of falsified invoices and systematic fraud in Wirecard’s international operations was uncovered.

Gill had been working at Wirecard for less than a year and believed he was in danger. When he was forced to leave in October 2018, he kept incriminating information and his mother reached out to a trusted journalist, Clare Rewcastle Brown.

She was his conduit to the Financial Times and other media outlets, including Suddeutsche Zeitung. Gill was initially relucant to reveal his identity out of fear for his and his mother’s safety. He believed they would be surveiled – or worse.

When the newspaper broke the story in early 2019, following months of work in secure conditions, Germany’s financial regulator took the company’s side and investigated the reporters instead of Wirecard.

After follow-up stories were published demonstrating that a significant proportion of the company’s business was fraudulent, Wirecard finally collapsed in June 2020, an embarrassing outcome for the financial regular.

Reporting on Wirecard required publications to stand up to legal threats like SLAPPs and intimidation. The case illustrated how whistleblowers and journalists can work together effectively to expose wrongdoing on a massive scale. But it also highlighted inherent dangers for both at a time when the journalism profession is under siege from governments, and the rich and powerful.

BABITA DEOKORAN (South Africa) - 2021 SPECIAL RECOGNITION AWARD

It was a classic case of a whistleblower with inside information who was a key witness in a long running investigation into alleged government corruption in South Africa – and it cost Babita Deokoran her life.

The chief director of financial accounting at the health department in Gauteng province was gunned down on 23 August this year outside her home in what authorities believe was a targeted killing to silence her forever.

She had joined the department 15 years earlier and rose through the ranks to a senior position that allowed her to control the paper trail of payments made to government service providers – and to spot irregularities.

The Special Investigating Unit (SIU), an agency in South Africa that undertakes forensic probes into corruption allegations at state entities, said she had been providing information on several cases for years.

She was one of a number of officials who provided evidence to the SIU into alleged corruption in the procurement of essential personal protective equipment (PPE) for medics on the front line of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, for which the local government spent the equivalent of nearly $184 million. The SIU found that in some cases payments were inflated by up to 400 percent.

The Auditor-General also found contracts were awarded to suppliers with no history of being able to provide the equipment and of vast overpricing.

The SIU flagged the failure to follow procurement guidelines with the award of three contracts in particular.

One was awarded to a company that belonged to the late husband of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, Khusela Diko. When this was exposed in the media, the company withdrew. But the SIU then found that a second company was being used as a front for the first.

The investigation – built in part on her work and evidence – led to the departure of provincial Health Minister Bandile Masuku, along with the department’s chief financial officer and its head of supply chain, as well as Diko’s suspension.

Colleagues told South African media that corruption was endemic in her department and that she was helping the SIU assemble a paper trail to implicate those involved, not just in Covid-era corruption, but in dubious transactions over the past decade.

An anonymous source who took part in that probe told South Africa’s Daily Maverick that Deokaran’s information showed a link between the investigations and a local, politically connected organised crime group.

She reportedly received threatening messages from a former member of the Gauteng legislature in the course of the latest investigation, ending in her murder in a hail of bullets after she dropped her teenage daughter off at school. She died in hospital.

WhatsApp messages were found from Deokaran that had been sent to civil society organisation the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation and were published by Daily Maverick, describing how she and other senior managers at the Gauteng health department were sidelined and faced false charges after raising questions about suspicious payments.

“They wanted us out of the way… they see me as an obstacle in payments they want to make to certain companies,” she wrote. “Every few years, we have a different team of people who come in and loot, and the funds seem to be a bottomless pit.”

Six suspects were arrested in connection with her murder, in part due to an account given by a witness who is now in hiding. Police Minister Bheki Cele told the media that the suspects were hired hitmen, and that investigators were looking for the masterminds who had contracted them to kill Deokaran.

Deokaran’s murder raised questions about why she was not given witness protection. President Ramaphosa said the country needs to do more to ensure that whistleblowers can safely exercise their rights under South Africa’s Protected Disclosures Act.

THABISO ZULU (South Africa) - 2021 SPECIAL RECOGNITION AWARD

Speaking out against corruption in South Africa requires real courage and Thabiso Zulu showed he had it, exposing fellow members of South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), the looting of municipal resources, police brutality and whistleblower victimisation.

It has made him the target of attacks, death threats and a failed assassination attempt. He remains uncowed, but has been forced into hiding in fear for his life, still uncompromising and sticking to his principles and beliefs in doing what’s right.

In 2016, he received documents from a friend and fellow activist, Sindiso Magaqa, who was previously Secretary-General of the ANC Youth League but had gone back to his hometown, Umzimkhulu, where he was elected a local councillor for the ANC.

The dossier contained documents suggesting that funds for building a memorial hall in Umzimkhulu had been looted by council officials. Zulu shared the dossier with law enforcement agencies.

Magaqa demanded a forensic audit into how the funds had been spent. In the months that followed, two councilors were assassinated, one of them who supported the audit. In 2017, Magaqa was ambushed while driving home. He was shot and badly injured, and died later in a hospital.

The press in South Africa later reported that the rifle and vehicle used in his assassination were allegedly bought by a police crime intelligence unit, using the police’s secret services account. Two of the suspects arrested in that case were police officers and a third was a registered police informant.

Zulu became a target for assassination himself when he stood up at Magaqa’s funeral, which was televised live and attended by senior ANC leaders, and declared that his friend had been killed for revealing corruption inside the party.

Zulu testified at the Moerane Commission of Inquiry into a wave of political murders in KwaZulu-Natal province, saying he had evidence implicating senior ANC politicians and municipal councilors on an even larger scale and that law enforcement would not move against politicians and politically connected municipal officials.

He was warned that hitmen had been hired to kill him and the Public Protector's office said that he and a fellow whistleblower needed state protection. But the Minister of Police refused and went to court to set aside the Public Protector’s findings.

In 2019 Zulu led a peaceful anti-corruption march. The next day he received a warning that he would be assassinated. A day later he was walking down the street when a vehicle pulled up and the occupants opened fire on him. He was injured but survived. Despite suffering multiple wounds, he left the hospital, fearing he would killed there.

In 2020, two days after leading another anti-corruption protest march, seven police officers descended on his home. He was allegedly pepper sprayed, badly beaten and arrested, spending the night in jail. During the arrest, his family members were allegedly insulted and threatened with rape.

He was charged with incitement to cause public violence, but the state declined to prosecute due to a lack of evidence. Fellow activists said the charges were trumped up in retaliation for his work as an anti-corruption crusader and social justice campaigner, and were aimed at intimidating him.

In October this year, he was arrested and charged with assault. Veteran KwaZulu-Natal human rights defender and researcher Mary de Haas described the action as part of a pattern of sinister abuses of power by the Minister of Police that poses a serious threat to whistleblowers.

He was allegedly coerced to retrieve and activate both his mobile phones, which were taken by the arresting officers, who said they would download the contents. De Haas said this puts anyone with whom he has been in contact at great risk.

He now moves around constantly to avoid being found by assassins, but insists he won’t be silenced. “There will be no retreat – that would be a betrayal of those who have sacrificed their lives for this struggle,” he told Blueprint for Free Speech. “If they want to silence me, they must kill me.”