In an endeavour to recover assets stolen by former Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych and his close allies, the Ukraine Prosecutor General's Office (PGO) is working closely with ICAR. On 12 November 2015, Basel Institute on Governance Managing Director Gretta Fenner met with Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in Kyiv to take stock of the cooperation between the two bodies and re-confirm their continued commitment to work jointly towards this common goal.

AML/CFT experts of the International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) are providing technical assistance and guidance to the Financial Intelligence Authority (FIA) of the Republic of Uganda with a view to establishing and operationalising an effective financial intelligence unit.

Specialists in international mutual legal assistance, financial investigation, intelligence gathering and asset recovery from some 30 countries and international organisations met in Lausanne from 21 to 23 February 2016 for the ‘Lausanne IX’ seminar on the efficient recovery of stolen PEP assets.

Right on time for the ART Basel, the world famous international art fair that takes place in Basel every year in June, the Basel Institute launched a public consultation on a Green Paper that sets out Anti-Money Laundering Principles for the Art Trade.

Good corporate governance plays an essential role in managing corporate risk. Primarily, it is designed to identify, manage and mitigate the risks that face companies operating in a multitude of countries and cultures. The Basel Institute regularly provides compliance advice to a wide range of industries and companies. 

In the context of a multi-centre research project, the Institute and its partners seek to map the manner in which informality is associated with the resilience of corruption. In this innovative project, researchers shift the focus away from analysing the implementation of formal legal frameworks, regulations and policies to concentrate on informal actions and practices that may be effectively taken into consideration where conventional anti-corruption interventions have failed.

The Basel Institute and the International Bar Association jointly published The International Bar Association Judicial Integrity Initiative: Judicial Systems and Corruption.

The Basel Institute has a long-standing working relationship with the government of Bhutan covering a range of joint endeavours on developing anti-corruption policies and asset recovery. For a new project, commissioned by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), researchers from the Basel Institute worked with Bhutanese authorities to introduce social accountability concepts to support efforts to encourage citizen participation in democratic practices at the local government level.

In September 2016, ICAR kicked off a new 3.5 year program of work in support of Malawi's key law enforcement agencies and their efforts to tackle serious corruption and related financial crimes. Financed with a grant from the UK Department for International Development, the program is a continuation and expansion of the already on-going work of ICAR - also funded by DFID - in Malawi, in the course of which two embedded experts were supporting Malawi authorities in the investigation and prosecution of the so-called Cashgate scandals. The latter continues to be a priority.

Analysing suspicious financial activities is a key function of Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs). To enhance the capacity of FIUs worldwide, ICAR in cooperation with the Egmont Group of FIUs has developed a unique e-learning course on “Operational Analysis”.