At an event in London co-hosted by the Basel Institute on Governance and Chatham House on Monday 10 July 2017, panelists from Jersey, Kenya, Nigeria and the UK agreed that partnership, understanding each other’s systems and procedures, and informal communication between requesting and requested states is critical to successfully recover stolen public funds internationally.

Listen to the keynote speech of Professor Mark Pieth, Chairman of the Basel Institute, at the DICO Forum Compliance 2017.

The speech was held on the occasion of the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Basel Institute and the German Institute for Compliance (DICO) in June 2017. More info here.

The Corporate Governance Capacity Building Initiative for Malaysian SMEs, an effort of the Malaysian Institute of Management (MIM) in conjunction with the Basel Institute on Governance kicked off with a half–day conference on "stepping up corporate governance and anti-corruption practices", specifically in the SME sector on 20 July 2017. It focused on the importance of SMEs, the backbone of the Malaysian economy, to take ownership of compliance and corporate governance to ensure sustained competitiveness on the global market.

On 29 September 2017, Professor Mark Pieth, President of the Basel Institute, moderated a panel discussion at the University of Basel on the topic of “how safe are football stadia?”

Last week two celebratory events took place that at first glance appear to have little in common: One was the annual awarding of the Nobel prizes in Stockholm. The other was in Paris, and it marked the 20th anniversary of the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery in International Business Transactions (‘Foreign Bribery Convention’).

On 15 and 16 January 2018, more than 60 financial investigators, lawyers, regulators and other specialists in anti-money laundering, cybercrime and financial intelligence took part in an expert workshop on Cryptocurrencies and Money Laundering jointly organised by the Basel Institute on Governance, Europol and INTERPOL in Basel, Switzerland.

The OECD and the Basel Institute on Governance would like to invite all participants of the 2018 OECD Global Anti-Corruption & Integrity Forum and any other interested stakeholders to attend the panel session.

Moderated by OECD Legal Director Nicola Bonucci

At the OECD Headquarters (2 rue André Pascal, Paris 75016) March 29, 2018, at 10am
Conference Centre, Room CC7

Practitioners and policy makers from Africa and Europe met last week in Berlin, Germany, to discuss ways to further accelerate the success rate in recovering stolen assets. The event was organised by the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) with support from the Basel Institute's International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) and GIZ, and brought together representatives from Ethiopia, France, Germany, Jersey, Kenya, Norway, Switzerland, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda and the United Kingdom. 

Informal practices are pervasive in all societies, and we are all in some form or other impacted by them, often without noticing at all but bearing the consequences nonetheless. Thus, they are hardly ever explicitly articulated or reflected in our governments’ policy making. The Basel Institute on Governance cordially invites you to a debate how informal practices shape the fabric of societies around the world and the impact they have on people’s life and more broadly on development outcomes. 

Those of us involved in corruption investigations and asset recovery know how important it is to gain fresh perspectives, contribute to international policy discussions, learn from others in the field and hopefully help them, too. In this spirit I am happy to share my experience from attending the 7th Session of the Conference of the States Parties (COSP) in Vienna in November 2017.