Our Team
Pavla Holcová
Founder and Director
Pavla is an investigative journalist and the founder of investigace.cz. She was invited to take part in the global investigation of the Panama Papers—the only journalist from the Czech Republic to do so—for which the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists won the Pulitzer Prize.
She has previously worked with Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismailova on a series of articles highlighting the illegal business activities of the Azerbaijani president and his relatives. For this exposé, both journalists received the Global Shining Light Award.
Together with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), she mapped billions of arms supplied to the conflict in Syria. Along with her colleagues, she was awarded the Serbian Prize for Investigative Journalism for their excellent work on this story.
Collaborating with Macedonian journalist Saška Cvetkovska, she revealed the secret investments of the former chief of the Macedonian secret service, Saso Mialkova. As a result of these and other related disclosures, Mialkov was forced to resign, leading to the fall of the Macedonian government. The journalists jointly won the European Union’s Investigative Journalism Award for their work on this case.
In November 2016, Pavla was selected as one of a hundred New Europe change-makers, people changing Central and Eastern Europe for the better. In 2018, she was selected for the European Young Leaders initiative. Prior to founding investigace.cz, Pavla worked for six years as the head of the Cuban division of People in Need.
Jaroslav Formánek
Reporter
Jaroslav has worked in investigace.cz since fall 2018 as the web’s editor. He had studied and lived part of his life in France. At the time he was a long term collaborator of the Czech weekly Respekt and BBC Czech for both of which he contributed political and cultural news from France. Upon his return to the Czech Republic he cooperated with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Czech Radio, the Lidové noviny daily and the magazines Revolver revue, Babylon, Prostor, Host and Paměť a dějiny. He carried out an analysis of news coverage for the Czech Television. He is also a fiction author and co-author of a book on Czechoslovaks in the Gulag forced labour camps. He is also a part time collaborator of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes.
Hana Čápová
Reporter
Hana has worked in investigace.cz as a reporter since summer 2019. She joined from the Czech weekly Respekt where she worked with intermissions in other major Czech media since 1998. Hana’s main focus was previously domestic politics, economy and social issues. She was nominated for the Czech Journalism Awards multiple times, including for the stories: “Natálka In The Land Without Mirrors” (A reportage about the life of a Roma girl and her family three years after a racist arson attack on them.), “Flight Over The Vrchlabí Nest” (An investigation into why a healthy man died in a hospital owned by the Czech politician Vladimir Dryml.), “Mr Mirror Must Pay” (Story of a man who owed hundreds of thousands Czk to lawyers and debt collectors for events that never happened.) and “Take The Bait And Pay!” (An analysis of how debt collection became profitable business.). She was awarded an honourable mention in journalism competition for the article “Czech Hell” about the life of gastarbeiters in the Czech Republic.
Jakub Šimák
Reporter
Jakub has been with investigace.cz since January 2018. He graduated from University College London and Saint Petersburg State University with degrees in Russian and East European Studies. He has previously worked for the Czech NGO People in Need, where he coordinated human rights projects in Azerbaijan, Ukraine and Transnistria. He also spent two-and-a-half years as a monitor and analyst with the European Union Monitoring Mission in Georgia.
Lukáš Nechvátal
Reporter
Lukáš joined investigace.cz in 2016 as an intern and worked his way up to become a reporter. He is completing his journalism degree at Charles University in Prague.
Eva Kubániová
Reporter
Eva has worked with Pavla since the beginning of investigace.cz. She studied journalism in Slovakia, France and the Czech Republic. She is the organization’s liaison for the V4 investigative project VSquare. She has also worked on various OCCRP projects and cooperated with Al Jazeera Balkans in the past.
Marek Martinovský
Reporter
Marek joined investigace.cz in June 2019 as a junior reporter. přišel v červnu 2019 jako juniorní redaktor. Je started his journalistic career in the online daily iHNed.cz where he worked as daily news writer. Later he worked as a foreign news writer in the online daily Seznam Zprávy. He reads journalism and international territorial studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague.
Veronika Divišová
Fundraiser
Veronika joined us in May 2018 after six years with the NGO Sourcefabric, where she focused on the link between digital technologies and journalism, as well as the issue of the financial sustainability of digital media. She had previously worked for the Czech NGO People in Need in its international humanitarian and development aid sector.
Jan Tlapák
IT Support
Jan has been with investigace.cz since the beginning, helping to get our website up and running and keeping it that way.
Lenka Matoušková
Graphic Designer
Lenka has worked with investigace.cz since its establishment and has helped to craft its visual aesthetic. She also creates illustrations for our stories.