Reuters, Forbes win business journalism awards from OPC

Steve Stecklow, Babak Dehghanpisheh and Yeganeh Torbati of Reuters won the Malcolm Forbes Award, which honors the best business reporting from abroad by a wire service or newspaper, from the Overseas Press Club on Thursday for their three-part series on the worth of the Ayatollah.

The judges were impressed by Reuters’ ability to piece together how Iran’s top religious cleric, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had amassed a financial empire worth $95 billion, rivaling the wealth of the late Shah. Stecklow and colleagues drew a devastating portrait of how Khamenei had secured a position in nearly every sector of Iran’s economy through a little-known agency called Setad.

Kerry Dolan of Forbes won the Morton Frank Award, which honors the best business reporting from abroad by a magazine.

This reexamination by Forbes of one of its “Rich List” constituents unmasked the myth of Prince Alwaleed as the “Buffett of Arabia.” Dolan’s reporting and analysis revealed a pattern by the Prince of “systematically exaggerating” the market value of Kingdom Holding, his publicly traded company, and other assets while misleading journalists and the public about his real net worth and his golden touch as an international investor.

Cam Simpson of Bloomberg News won the Joe and Laurie Dine Award, which honors the best international reporting dealing with human rights, for a series that showed the grim reality of the life of workers who make the shiny Apple phones so coveted by the world’s consumers.

Martin Wolf of The Financial Times won the award for best commentary.

See all of the awards here.