Aiko Kempen

Aiko Kempen was selected for the 2025 Shortlist with Bismarck’s Hut in the Forest.

Aiko Kempen is an investigative journalist at FragDenStaat, Germany‘s biggest transparency and freedom of information platform.

He was part of the team that published the classified „NSU-Files“ who were intended to stay under lock and key for 120 years, he showed the tight ropes between government officials and billion-dollar company Tesla and published the restrictive contracts between UEFA and host cities of the 2024 European Football Tournament.

His work – as well as FragDenStaat‘s work in general – always includes publishing not only the story but also the sources and original documents; sometimes thousands of pages.

Natalia Zaharescu

Natalia Zaharescu was selected for the 2025 Shortlist with Serving Moscow.

Natalia Zaharescu has over 15 years of experience in the media. After more than 10 years of radio, Natalia joined the investigative department of Ziarul de Garda in January 2022. In the same year, Natalia Zaharescu conducted, together with three other ZdG journalists, an undercover investigation, demonstrating how Ilan Șor, an oligarch later sentenced to 15 years in prison for robbing a billion from the Moldovan banking system, organised paid protests.

In 2024, Natalia, together with her colleague, Măriuța Nistor, conducted another undercover investigation, in which the journalists managed to demonstrate that the same oligarch Ilan Șor, who fled from the Republic of Moldova to Moscow, formed and coordinated a vote-buying network, with the aim of fraud in the presidential elections and the referendum on European integration. For this investigation, the journalists of Ziarul de Garda received several national awards, including the Investigation of the Year award, offered by the annual Press Club in Chisinau, and an excellence award from the Union of Professional Journalists in Romania.