About

Gerard Ryle began his career as a journalist in Ireland and moved to Australia in 1988.

At The Age in Melbourne he reported on police corruption and later worked in the paper's investigative team with Gary Hughes.

He joined The Sydney Morning Herald in 1998 and spent twelve years there, as investigations editor and head of the paper's investigative unit, and later as news editor.

From January 2007 his articles in the Herald questioned Firepower, a fuel-technology company that had become one of the country's biggest sports sponsors. Firepower answered with lawsuits against the paper and against him personally. Over two years and more than 60 articles the story unravelled, and in 2009 Allen & Unwin published his book Firepower: The most spectacular fraud in Australian history.

He was a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan in 2005–2006, and deputy editor of The Canberra Times in 2010–2011.

In September 2011 he became director of ICIJ, then a project of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, and the consortium's first director from outside the United States. A hard drive he had received by mail from an anonymous source became the starting point of Offshore Leaks, published in April 2013 with 86 journalists from 46 countries.

Under his leadership ICIJ went on to publish the Panama Papers (2016), the Paradise Papers (2017) and the Pandora Papers (2021), working with reporters and media partners around the world. He remains ICIJ's executive director.

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