Gretta Fenner is the Managing Director of the Basel Institute on Governance and Director of its International Centre for Asset Recovery.
Under her leadership from 2005–2008 and from 2011 to the present and together with her management team, the Basel Institute has grown into an 110+ strong agile and global organisation with programmes across Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, field offices and embedded experts in over 10 countries, and an extensive network of partners in anti-corruption and good governance at the highest national and international levels.
She has been instrumental in shaping the Basel Institute's reputation for evidence-based and innovative anti-corruption and public governance approaches. Many of the organisation's government partners have made leaps forward in their efforts to deter corruption and recover stolen assets through pioneering uses of tools including unexplained wealth legislation, plea bargaining, non-conviction based confiscation, multidisciplinary asset recovery taskforces and novel information-sharing partnerships. She has also developed the Basel Institute’s role as a leading centre of expertise in Collective Action to improve private-sector integrity and address shared problems of corruption that hinder business and investment. Gretta continues to drive the Institute forward into new areas including the illegal wildlife trade and other forms of environmental crime, where this holistic and integrated approach is already demonstrating solid results.
Prior to joining the Basel Institute, Gretta worked at the OECD in Paris as the organisation’s manager for anti-corruption programmes in the Asia-Pacific region, where she played a key role in establishing the ADB/OECD Anti-Corruption Initiative for Asia-Pacific. In addition, while based in Australia and Oxford, UK from 2008 to 2011, Gretta advised a wide range of governments, donors, international organisations and multinational corporations on governance and anti-corruption topics, as well as organisational change, development processes and policy design.
Gretta is a political scientist by training and holds bachelor and master degrees from the Otto-Suhr-Institute at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and the Paris Institute for Political Science (Sciences Po Paris), France. In 2010, she completed an MBA at the Curtin University Graduate School of Business, Australia.