Reuters names internal winners

Ben Lim, a Reuters reporter in China, won the company’s award as reporter of the year last week.

Lim produced a string of major scoops, ranging from China’s plans to bail out local governments to its plans to build two new aircraft carriers. In November, Ben reported that China’s top leaders, miffed at the EU’s unwillingness to offer concessions to China, were leaning away from providing direct aid to help with the euro zone crisis.

A series of stories on shell companies led by Brian Grow was named the enterprise story of the year. Reuters investigations traced the myriad ways that U.S. laws enable corporations, international and domestic, to operate secretly within the country — sometimes protecting themselves from exposure, sometimes insulating themselves from alleged wrongdoing, sometimes perpetrating scams that have bilked millions from U.S. taxpayers.

Reuters editor Mark Bendeich won the editor of the year award. He exhibited exceptional leadership in driving coverage of the $1.7 billion accounting fraud at Olympus Corp, a story that ranks as one of Japan’s worst corporate scandals.

Under Bendeich’s leadership, Reuters revealed the key transactions, personalities and conflicts of interest that lay hidden behind a thick cloak of denial and accounting trickery at Olympus, and clearly analyzed how and why such a once-proud blue chip firm resorted to cooking the books for two decades. In addition, Reuters gave readers deep insights into wider implications of the scandal, such as the questions and challenges it posed for Japan’s corporate governance, its corporate culture, for the global auditing industry and for investor confidence in the wider Japanese market.

See all of the winners here.