UK · Bias: Left-leaning
Scott Trust Limited (no shareholders)
Who owns The Guardian? Nobody you can buy shares in. It belongs to the Scott Trust — a structure created in 1936 (a limited company since 2008) whose only job is to own Guardian Media Group forever and keep the paper editorially independent. No billionaire, no dividend-hungry shareholders, and a war chest to make it stick: the Trust's endowment stood at about $1.55 billion in 2026. That cushion got its biggest boost in 2014 when the Trust sold its stake in Auto Trader, yes, the used-car classifieds site, for £619 million. The independence bought it the nerve to publish Edward Snowden's NSA surveillance leaks in 2013, work that won a shared Pulitzer Prize with The Washington Post in 2014. It also produced one of journalism's stranger true stories: to satisfy the UK government without fully surrendering, editors destroyed the Guardian's own hard drives containing the files with angle grinders in their basement, while GCHQ agents stood and watched — and still left empty-handed, because copies already existed abroad.
In 2016, The Guardian was part of a massive international collaboration — coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists across dozens of newsrooms worldwide — that published the Panama Papers: 11.5 million leaked documents exposing how the world's wealthy and powerful hid money in offshore shell companies. The goal was straightforward: follow the money wherever it led, regardless of whose name came up. It led, among many places, to Iceland's own prime minister, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, who resigned within days of the documents revealing he and his wife had secretly owned an offshore company holding investments in Iceland's own collapsed banks. It remains one of the largest and most consequential leak-based investigations in journalism history.