Open Secrets (South Africa)
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 | |
| Formation | 2012 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Hennie van Vuuren |
| Type | Independent nonprofit organization |
| Registration no. | 195-990-NPO[1] |
| Legal status | Registered nonprofit |
| Purpose | Social justice Investigations into economic crimes |
| Headquarters | Cape Town, South Africa[1] |
Region served | South Africa |
Official language | English |
Key people | Thandeka Gqubule-Mbeki (Chairwoman)[2] |
Publication | Declassified: Apartheid Profits Unaccountable Who Owns South Africa? The Corporations & Economic Crime Report (CECR) Apartheid Guns and Money: A tale of profit[3] |
| Revenue |  R10.4 million (2024)[4] |
| Staff | 22 (2026)[2] |
| Website | opensecrets |
Open Secrets is a South African registered nonprofit social justice organization, based in Cape Town.
Founded in 2012, Open Secrets works to expose economic crime and human rights abuses, holding powerful corporations, politicians, and other private individuals to account. It operates without funding from corporations or governments.[2][5][6]
Open Secrets was originally established through a fellowship awarded by the Open Society Foundation for South Africa in 2012. It operated as a project of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation from January 2014.[2]
The organization was founded by Hennie van Vuuren, a researcher and anti-corruption activist who was a fellow of the Open Society Foundation for South Africa, Director at the Institute for Security Studies, and author of The Devil in the Detail: How the Arms Deal Changed Everything (2011).[7][8]
In 2017, the work of Open Secrets gained significant traction, when the organization published Apartheid Guns and Money: A tale of profit, a 600+ page book, authored by van Vuuren, about apartheid's economic crimes. The book was an exposé of the machinery that was created in defense of apartheid and in support of sanctions busting, as well as the people who profited from such.[7] To create the book, research was conducted into over 45,000 documents from 26 public and private collections, across seven countries.[9]
In the same year, Open Secrets registered as an independent nonprofit organization. It is also registered as a public benefit organization (PBO).[2]
In 2018, Open Secrets launched a podcast titled Freedom for Sale, and launched a new website to serve as a repository for information about the organization's various projects.[9]