Award name: 12 The Morton Frank Award

Best magazine international business news reporting in print or digital AWARD DATE: 2017 AWARD NAME: 12 The Morton Frank Award AWARD RECIPIENT: Monte Reel AWARD RECIPIENT AFFILIATION: Bloomberg Businessweek AWARD HONORED WORK: “How to Rebuild Puerto Rico” AWARD SPONSOR: Mark Lemcke Puerto Rico lives in a limbo. As a territory of the United States, its…

Best magazine international business news reporting in print or online AWARD YEAR: 2015 AWARD NAME: The Morton Frank Award 2015 RECIPIENT: Christina Larson AFFILIATION: Foreign Policy HONORED WORK: “The Zhao Method” Christina Larson chronicles the rise of 23-year-old Zhao Bowen, who abandoned China’s state-run scientific research institutions to join the country’s emerging entrepreneurial class. Larson…

Six years after Robert Mugabe brutalized the opposition to win re-election in 2008 as president of Zimbabwe, Bloomberg reporters Cam Simpson and Jesse Westbrook set out to trace a $100 million cash infusion originating from a U.S. hedge fund that helped prop up his dictatorial, financially hard-pressed regime at a crucial moment. In this well-written, diligently researched page-turner, Simpson and Westbrook raised the veil on a series of financial transactions involving the Wall Street hedge fund, bankers and mining companies headquartered in London, shell companies and a rich platinum mining claim in Zimbabwe controlled by the government. Their account shows how global investments can end up in treacherous hands with terrible unintended consequences. Much of the reporting was done from afar after Simpson went to Zimbabwe with a valid visa, only to have government officials there threaten his arrest and force him to flee.

This reexamination by Forbes of one of its “Rich List” constituents unmasked the myth of Prince Alwaleed as the “Buffett of Arabia.” Kerry 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.

This timely, well-written account shows how the unprecedented scale of Chinese corporate espionage and wholesale intellectual property theft is devastating U.S. companies. This strongly sourced story details the plight of American Superconductor Corp. which discovered that Sinovel, a Chinese wind turbine manufacturer that was once its biggest customer, schemed to steal and illegally replicate AMSC’s software and electronic systems to power more than 1,000 Chinese windmills.