Glenn R. Simpson
Senior Fellow, Corruption and Transnational Crime
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Glenn Simpson has 20 years of experience investigating financial crime, from the savings and loan and BCCI scandals of the 1980s to the 2008 collapse of Wall Street. His specialties include money laundering, tax havens and offshore banking, political corruption, terrorist financing, sanctions, transnational organized crime, bribery by multinational companies, and bank, tax and securities fraud. In addition to his long tenure in the Washington bureau of The Wall Street Journal, he was also stationed in Brussels, Belgium and has reported throughout the Middle East, Europe and the Caribbean.
Mr. Simpson was part of a Wall Street Journal team that won the Scripps Howard Foundation's National Journalism Award for coverage of the credit crisis. He won the top award from the Society of American Business Writers & Editors for his 2004 series exposing criminal activity at Riggs Bank, which triggered congressional inquiries, an admission of criminal conduct by Riggs, and the 170-year-old bank’s demise. He was a part of a team that received a top award for investigations into accounting fraud and offshore activities of American International Group.
His research and testimony were the basis for the successful defense of The Wall Street Journal in four major libel cases in Europe, all brought by parties suspected of involvement in financing Islamic terrorism. Three cases ended in verdicts for The Journal, while the fourth was dropped by the plaintiff. One verdict, Jameel v. Wall Street Journal Europe, greatly strengthened the power British media to cover terrorism cases.
In recent years, Mr. Simpson has written extensively on Russian corporate crime and criminal organizations. He has authored numerous articles about international tax evasion schemes and tax havens, including a multi-billion-dollar scheme by Microsoft. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, he has also produced in-depth research on corruption and money laundering in the Middle East. His articles exposing illegal foreign contributions in the 1996 Presidential campaign resulted in numerous prosecutions and a special congressional inquiry.
He has also covered technology and privacy, the Justice Department, Congress, the White House, the Federal Trade Commission, and scandals such as the impeachment of President William Clinton. He is the co-author (with Larry J. Sabato) of the book, Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics (Times Books/Random House, 1995).
