The Basel Institute’s head of compliance, corporate governance and collective action talks to Ruth Green of the International Bar Association about anti-corruption programmes, the Panama Papers leaks, and what companies can do to better manage and mitigate risks. This article is posted with the permission of the International Bar Association and can be found in its entirety here.

The Basel Institute on Governance and its International Centre for Collective Action recently concluded its second international Anti-Corruption Collective Action Conference. The event, which took place on October 20-21 2016 in Basel, brought together nearly 200 participants from business, government, civil society, international organisations, academia and beyond, with participants hailing from every continent.

Active risk management and holistic approaches to preventing and mitigating threats and hazards have been identified as increasingly important to companies.

This piece was originally published by the B Team Blog on 10 April 2017. Republished here with permission.

Metro Cash & Carry is one of the world’s leading self-service wholesale companies – selling food and non-food products to businesses and governments. In the past, MC&C’s Ukrainian branch would turn down potential business contracts with the Ukrainian government to avoid well-known and widespread corruption in its public procurement system.

In early 2017 nearly 200 police officers implicated in an alleged graft scandal were dismissed from the Rwandan Police Force. This prompted President Kagame to reiterate the importance of fighting corruption in the run up to the election: "All of you should stand up against corruption," he said. "You cannot stay silent and expect others to hold those involved accountable."

The Wolfsberg Group, an association of thirteen global banks working together since 2000 to develop financial industry guidance on financial crime risks, has recently updated its 2011 Anti-Bribery and Corruption Guidance. 

In June 2016 the Bundestag revised its anti-corruption law with the aim of closing a gap in the demand side of corruption in the healthcare sector. One year on, what has been the effect of this law in light of the German Pharma Industry’s Transparency Codex?

Last week, we presented the results of the Basel Institute on Governance’s new report entitled New Perspectives on E-Government and the Prevention of Corruption at a side event on innovative solutions to corruption prevention at the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) Conference of States Parties (COSP) in Vienna, Austria.

Below is an interview with Mr. Camilo Alberto Enciso Vanegas, former Secretary for Transparency of the Presidency of the Republic of Colombia and international anti-corruption expert, who visited Peru on behalf of the Basel Institute on Governance (BIG) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in August and October 2017 to support efforts to adopt a High Level Reporting Mechanism (HLRM) in the country.

Chocolate and Christmas go together like holly and ivy, adding anti-corruption Collective Action into the cocoa supply chain would be a real sweetener.

Here’s a look at a Collective Action initiative that was signed in Ghana a few years ago. It would benefit not only from being updated and from being given a new focus that explicitly addresses corruption, not only as underpinning sustainability issues but in its own right and as an issue that should bring all the stakeholders together, because it’s a deep rooted issue that needs concerted efforts.