With a view to fostering co-operation across regional and international boarders to successfully handle asset recovery cases, the International Centre for Asset Recovery recently had the opportunity to conduct a regional training programmes in Botswana.

Sustainable capacity building at a national level is a key activity of the Basel Institute's International Centre for Asset Recovery. Train-the-Trainer (TTT) programmes play an important role in the process. Between January and September 2017, ICAR experts delivered a series of practical training workshops on Financial Investigations and Asset Recovery in Tanzania to nearly 100 investigators and prosecutors, four of which were also trained to become certified trainers.

In September, Ugandan prosecutors secured another conviction for money laundering by a former Swedish Embassy accountant, only a few months after the country's first ground-breaking money laundering trial. The accused, who stole almost EUR 1.9 million, was charged by the prosecution with money laundering, embezzlement, forgery and uttering a false document. 

The Basel Institute has recently been appointed to facilitate a new sector-specific Collective Action initiative for the banknote industry. Initial collaborative discussions on the process forward for this initiative has been on-going for a couple of months. These discussions have laid the necessary consultative foundations for the initiative to fully take off in 2018.

Check out our recent FCPA blog: The Basel Art Trade Guidelines 10 years on. 

Thomas Christ, member of the Foundation Board of the Basel Institute, provides a contemporary perspective on an industry sector that has increasingly come into the spotlight of law enforcement and business integrity circles in recent years – the Art Market. 

Both in investment and in commercial arbitration, it is becoming more and more frequent that a party raises the objection of corruption, money laundering, fraud or bid rigging.

The challenges this presents for arbitrators and parties are considerable and were the topic of a conference organised by the University of Basel in cooperation with the Basel Institute on Governance.

In March experts of the Basel Institute were among the winners of a competitive call for papers in the context of the 2018 OECD Global Anti-Corruption & Integrity Forum in Paris.

In a poster market setting and through a simultaneous TED-talk style research pitch, they interactively presented their paper on the topic of “Harnessing social networks for anti-corruption” at the event.

The Basel Institute has begun work on a mandate for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) to provide support over a period of four years to the SDC DDLG thematic unit on a variety of good governance and related projects.

This work is conducted through a consortium led by the UK’s Institute for Development Studies (IDS) with the Basel Institute, XImpulse and the Hirondelle Foundation as participating members.

With a follow-on grant from the British Academy’s Anti-Corruption Evidence programme (ACE), funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the Basel Institute will pursue a “phase two” research project stemming from the original and completed research study on "Informal Governance and Corruption: Transcending the Principal-Agent and Collective Action Paradigms".

This follow-on project will be led by Dr. Scott Newton of SOAS as Principal Investigator and Dr. Claudia Baez-Camargo of the Basel Institute as Co-Investigator.

Dr. Claudia Baez-Camargo, Head of Governance Research at the Basel Institute, presented her team’s findings from its two-year research project on Informal Governance and Corruption: Transcending the Principal-Agent and Collective Action Paradigms at the award holders’ event of the ACE programme at the British Academy in London on 27 February.