Tom Bergin

Tom Bergin is an investigative financial journalist at Reuters who traces how money moves through complex structures and who benefits when rules are bent or rewritten. He focuses on regulatory abuses, fraud, tax avoidance and illicit money flows in corporate and political finance. Alongside long-form investigations, he also produces finance desk coverage of market moves, including day-of stories on Wall Street equity indexes and sector shifts in response to corporate news and geopolitical developments. His reporting leans on detailed analysis of filings and disclosures to show how financial engineering translates into gains for insiders and risks for investors and taxpayers.

Crypto ventures, political power and investor losses

A defining strand of Bergin’s recent work is his coverage of crypto ventures tied to the Trump family and the broader financial implications of those projects. In a special report on the Trump crypto “playbook”, he documented how the family generated at least $2.3 billion in profit from their main crypto businesses while more than a million investors collectively lost $2.3 billion, highlighting the asymmetry of risk between insiders and retail buyers. He followed that analysis with a detailed breakdown of how much money the Trumps made from four major crypto projects, how much of their own capital they committed, and how outside investors fared, quantifying both realized and paper losses.

Bergin has also examined Trump’s official financial disclosures, reporting first on more than $600 million in income from crypto, golf and licensing and later on over $1.4 billion in income from family crypto ventures in a single year, underscoring how digital assets became a central pillar of Trump’s earnings. Another line of coverage tracks where those crypto proceeds went, including stories showing Trump’s money managers moving a significant share into stocks and bonds and mapping how his portfolios of traditional securities expanded as crypto revenues surged. He links these flows to questions of ethics and oversight, reporting on calls from lawmakers for securities regulators to preserve records related to Trump-associated crypto businesses and probing potential conflicts of interest. Within this sub-beat, Bergin’s distinguishing trait is his use of granular financial data to connect the promotional rhetoric around political figures’ crypto ventures with the actual risk-return outcomes for ordinary investors.

Corporate tax strategies and offshore structures

Bergin’s investigations extend deep into corporate tax behaviour, especially where companies use cross-border structures to cut their tax bills.

In a recent examination of Tesla, he showed how units in the Netherlands and Singapore booked $18 billion in profits that were not taxed locally, a pattern that saved the company more than $400 million in U.S. taxes through profit shifting. Earlier work has dissected the tax practices of multinational consumer and tech companies, including investigations into how Starbucks, Vodafone, eBay and Amazon used complex arrangements to minimize tax payments in Europe and how the UK tax authority developed unusually close relationships with large businesses.

Across these stories, he treats tax as a core part of corporate strategy rather than a technical footnote, explaining how loopholes and offshore structures translate into competitive advantage and public revenue loss. Bergin’s speciality in regulatory gaming and tax avoidance gives his coverage a consistent lens: he looks beyond headline profits to examine how companies structure their obligations and what that reveals about the balance of power between regulators and the firms they oversee.

Debt markets, conflicts of interest and systemic risk

Bergin also writes on how financing choices reverberate through economies and political systems, with a focus on debt and conflicts of interest.

In a joint investigation into Africa’s use of international bond markets, he explored how a supposed “ticket” to prosperity instead contributed to rising debt burdens, showing how borrowing structures and investor expectations can fuel vulnerabilities in developing economies. His reporting on the Trump Organization’s repayment of a $160 million loan tied to a landmark office tower examined the firm’s evolving financial position and the role of court judgments, market conditions and refinancing in reshaping its balance sheet. He has contributed to work uncovering that more than 100 U.S. political figures have ancestral ties to slavery, connecting historical wealth and power to contemporary debates over race, representation and accountability.

Within finance, he often situates individual loans, bond deals or ownership structures in a broader narrative about systemic risk, governance and who ultimately bears the cost when things go wrong.

Awards, books and long-form investigations

Bergin’s approach is rooted in long-form investigative reporting, and his work has prompted inquiries and drawn recognition across multiple regions. He has received major honours including the Gerald Loeb Prize for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism and the Orwell Prize for Journalism, reflecting both the depth of his financial coverage and its impact on public debate. He writes regularly on corporate and economic affairs, often producing multi-part series that combine data analysis with on-the-ground reporting from different countries. Bergin is also the author of Spills & Spin: The Inside Story of BP, a book examining the history and communications strategy of a global oil company, and Free Lunch Thinking: 8 Economic Myths and Why Politicians Fall for Them, which critiques widely held economic ideas and their influence on policy.

Taken together, his books and investigations show a consistent interest in how narratives about markets and policy are constructed, and how those narratives can obscure the distribution of risk, reward and responsibility in modern finance.