Fortunes of War by ABC News (Australia)

“Fortunes of War” combined data journalism and boots-on-the-ground reporting to expose allegations of deceptive behaviour by Australian pension funds.

Our investigation painstakingly compiled public disclosure data from sustainable, socially conscious or ethical-labelled superannuation options, to find out if the promises these funds are making match the reality of where member’s money ends up. We revealed ethical-labelled funds hold almost $30 million dollars in companies involved in making some of the most controversial weapons of war including nuclear weapons, white phosphorus munitions and depleted uranium ammunition. When we cast the net even wider to include companies involved in weapons-related products or services for militaries, the ABC found a further $1.1 billion in investments.

We used data to produce visually compelling digital articles and video explainers that stepped readers through the findings in careful detail. The team also created a tool that allowed our audience to easily assess and compare the share holdings of sustainable-labelled funds and to see how their retirement savings are being invested.

The wrangling of the data and coming up with a robust way of classifying, for example, a controversial weapon manufacturer were two big challenges.

There is no requirement for funds to publish disclosures in a consistent format. The spreadsheet structure changes between funds and assets are named inconsistently. That meant we had to manually clean and copy over the data from each portfolio into our master spreadsheet.

We then needed to develop a way to compare the shareholdings in the disclosures with a list of public companies globally that report revenue from controversial industries. We used ISIN codes - a globally consistent, unique code for publicly listed companies. We sourced ISINs from public databases and matched them to our data.

In the wake of our reporting in “Fortunes of War” was published, one of Australia’s largest funds announced it planned to overhaul the wording of its investment policies to exclude some of the weapons types examined in our story.