This Case Study demonstrates how international cooperation and the follow-the-money approach revealed a transnational criminal network trafficking endangered species and led to Madagascar’s first money laundering conviction related to wildlife trafficking.

Key points:

• In 2024, Thai authorities carried out the country's largest ever single wildlife seizure, intercepting 48 lemurs and more than 1,000 tortoises endemic to Madagascar.
• The seizure triggered a joint Thai-Malagasy investigation that traced smuggling routes through Indonesia, uncovered a transnational criminal network and led to arrests in both countries, the freezing of bank accounts and the confiscation of vehicles and vessels.
• In 2025, the Anti-Corruption Court in Antananarivo convicted 10 individuals for trafficking in protected species, money laundering and criminal conspiracy. Sentences of up to 10 years in prison were handed down, alongside approximately USD 8.7 million in customs penalties and damages. This is the first time Madagascar has applied the offence of money laundering to a wildlife trafficking case.
• Training on financial investigations by the Basel Institute on Governance, together with the facilitation of information exchange and peer learning among enforcement practitioners, contributed to this landmark result. The Malagasy authorities are now better equipped to overcome structural challenges in applying a “follow-the-money” approach to organised environmental crime, including limited technical expertise, insufficient resources and the complexity of cross-border financial investigations.

About this Case Study

This publication is part of the Basel Institute on Governance Case Study series, ISSN 2813-3900. It is licensed for sharing under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

The Case Study series offers practitioners insights into interesting and precedent-setting cases involving corruption and asset recovery. This case relates to the Basel Institute's Green Corruption programme.

The development of this publication was funded through the Illegal Wildlife Trade (IWT) Challenge Fund.

The contents are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Basel Institute on Governance, its donors and partners, or the University of Basel.

Suggested citation: Rakotondramanana, Joseph. 2026. “Madagascar: a landmark conviction for money laundering linked to environmental crime.” Case Study 14, Basel Institute on Governance. Available at: https://baselgovernance.org/publications/cs-14.