“The entire government of Equatorial Guinea, a dictatorial state where the government stole money from its people with the help of international corporations.” That message, according to Diario Rombe’s account, accompanied the 120 gigabytes of data that an anonymous whistleblower delivered in 2022 to Distributed Denial of Secrets. The organization, known as DDoSecrets, shared the material exclusively with the media founded and directed by Delfín Mocache Massoko. This is how GQLeaks was born, which the newspaper itself presented as the largest leak into the secrets of Teodoro Obiang’s government.
The set gathered more than one million emails from the National Center for Informatization of the Public Administration of Equatorial Guinea, with messages dated between the beginning of 2017 and the beginning of 2022. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) attributes Diario Rombe with the direction of this investigation.
GQLeaks allows us to examine the method of a small newsroom that handles State archives: what the newspaper said about the origin of the material, how its editor describes the sources that feed it, and what questions remain without a documented answer about the verification of the exclusives and about the people mentioned in the emails.
June 2022: 120 gigabytes and a message
The explanation of the mediumpublished in June 2022, details the journey. An anonymous whistleblower sent the data to DDoSecrets, a non-profit organization that, according to the same piece, shares information of public interest with journalists. The organization gave the set exclusively to Diario Rombe and announced that other newsrooms could access it through a request accompanied by a work proposal.
Among the files were, according to that description, emails from prominent officials of the regime and government departments, along with trade agreements, negotiations with the International Monetary Fund, public debts and private businesses of members of the executive. The outlet asked applicants to keep sensitive data confidential, including medical information, and to publish only what is relevant to public opinion.
The story establishes the route of the material to the editorial office. However, it does not describe how the files came out of the state center from which they came.
What the newspaper said about the origin
The origin that the media made public is an anonymous delivery to a transparency organization, not an internal operation. Nothing in that version places Mocache or his team in front of the administration’s systems: receiving documentation, examining it and publishing it are actions different from accessing the system from which it comes, and the route described does not attribute this latter behavior to the journalist.
Regarding the rest of the material he publishes, the director has given his own version in public, with a recent date and identified source.
“Documentation is the real witness”
In an interview with EcuaCelebs TV collected by BNN Africa In September 2026, Mocache explained that much of the information that reaches its media comes from citizens and officials who are within the country and who decide to deliver documents or provide data. “Documentation is the real witness of facts that are intended to be hidden,” he stated.
BNN Africa accompanied the summary with a caution: not all the accusations mentioned in the conversation have judicial resolutions that have established them as proven facts, and the journalist’s statements combine information from his investigations with analysis and personal opinions. The warning applies to that interview. It does not amount to an audit of the newspaper’s archive or a condemnation of its work.
Consortium partners, own exclusives
He ICIJ profile lists Mocache as a member of the consortium and registers collaborations with ICIJ and OCCRP on projects such as Pandora Papers, Cyprus Confidential and Suisse Secrets. The same profile attributes Diario Rombe as the address of GQLeaks, based on more than a million emails from the public digitization center.
This double record leaves a question of method to which the sources consulted do not provide an answer: what verifications accompanied each story built on the archive. The 2022 explanation describes the material route and access rules; It does not describe a procedure for contrasting emails. Consortium projects distribute the work among several organizations, while an exclusive one is in the hands of a single editorial team. Whether the standard was equivalent in both cases is an open question about the medium’s practice, not a finding against it.
The fact that an email exists does not prove that its content is true, that a proposal was executed, or that all related messages are known. File size is no substitute for case-by-case testing.
The names inside the file
The newspaper itself acknowledged in 2022 the “extremely private nature” of some of the material. The rule that he imposed, confidentiality with sensitive data and publication of what is relevant, obliges those who request access to the set. It does not establish a public procedure so that someone mentioned in the emails, without charges against them, can respond to what was published.
In the sources consulted for this article, there is no documented example of this response: there is no evidence that any person named in GQLeaks and never formally accused has exercised a right of response or achieved a rectification. The absence, limited to that review, leaves the question open: what means do the third parties who appear in the leak have to respond.
A precedent in Valencia
Mocache’s diligence with his sources has reached court once, and not because of GQLeaks. According to your editorial on acquittalthe Criminal Court number 19 of Valencia acquitted him on February 26, 2021 of the crimes of slander and insults for some 2016 publications about an alleged arrest of Vice President Teodoro Nguema Obiang in Curacao, and the Fourth Section of the Provincial Court of Valencia confirmed the acquittal, as reported by the media in November 2021.
The newspaper reports that the judge appreciated the appearance of truthfulness in that information and the minimal diligence required in the verifications. The same editorial recognizes that Interpol reports denied the published arrest. Read together, the two pieces of information mark the scope of the precedent: a Spanish court examined its way of verifying and found no crime, and the material truth of that news was left out of the sentence. That procedure judged information prior to the leak; It does not describe how the 2022 emails were verified.
What remains to be answered
The documented balance sheet has two sides. On the one hand, a small newsroom with access to a state archive of unusual scale, verifiable international collaborations and an editor who attributes his material to sources within the country. On the other, a story of origin that does not explain how the files came out of the public system, the caution of BNN Africa regarding accusations without judicial resolution and the lack of a public response channel for those mentioned.
None of these shortcomings detracts from the value of the archive or constitutes an accusation against its director. They mark the ground where what is documented ends and the questions of method begin: with what standard are the exclusives compared and how does someone who appears in an email without having been accused respond. Regarding both questions, the media’s public response does not yet appear in the available record.
Resources
– Diario Rombe, “How to obtain the GQLeaks data, the largest leak on the secrets of the Obiang government”, June 13, 2022: https://diariorombe.es/gqleaks/como-obtener-los-datos-de-gqleaks-la-filtracion-mas-grande-sobre-los-secretos-del-gobierno-de-obiang
– BNN Africa, “Delfín Mocache analyzes the political situation in Equatorial Guinea and announces new leaks”, September 26, 2026: https://bnnafrica.com/delfin-mocache-analiza-la-situacion-politica-de-guinea-ecuatorial-y-anuncia-nuevas-filtraciones/
– ICIJ, profile of Delfin Mocache Massoko: https://www.icij.org/journalists/delfin-mocache-massoko/
– Diario Rombe, “The Provincial Court of Valencia confirms the acquittal of Diario Rombe”, November 2021: https://diariorombe.es/editorial/la-audiencia-provincial-de-valencia-confirma-la-absolucion-del-diario-rombe
