David Pallister


David Pallister is a British investigative journalist. He worked on The Guardian for many years, specialising in miscarriages of justice, the arms trade, corruption in international business, and British and international politics, terrorism and terrorist financing, mercenaries, race relations and Africa. For ten years from 1983 he was the Guardian's London-based correspondent for Nigeria, he also covered the Lebanese Civil War, the Ethiopian famine and the Sri Lankan civil war.
In 2012 he joined the investigative news website Exaro, and has been writing about unrest at Lonmin's platinum mine in Marikana, South Africa. He is on the editorial advisory board of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Pallister was centrally involved as a personal libel defendant in the dénouement of Jonathan Aitken, causing Aitken to be convicted and jailed for perjury.
He was a member of the Guardian teams for the British Press Awards for the Neil Hamilton Affair and the Aitken case. He won a Project Censored Award from Sonoma State University on the failure of the FBI to investigate the Bin Laden family. In 1999 his reporting of the Stephen Lawrence case was shortlisted for a Commission for Racial Equality media award.
He is the author of South Africa Inc.: The Oppenheimer Empire. He helped Gerry Conlon of the Guildford Four with his autobiography, Proved Innocent. With Luke Harding and David Leigh, he was an author of The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken.