Criminal assets can cross borders in hours, while international asset recovery often struggles to keep pace. The INTERPOL Silver Notice is designed to close this gap by enabling earlier identification and tracing of criminal assets across jurisdictions. Can this new instrument fundamentally change how law enforcement responds to the rapid flight of illicit wealth?
How investigative journalists expose risks, support law enforcement action and strengthen accountability in the use of virtual assets
The expansion of virtual assets has reshaped financial ecosystems, bringing innovation but also significant risks linked to fraud, money laundering and other financial crimes. Alongside governments and international organisations, investigative journalists play a critical role in identifying abuses, raising awareness and promoting accountability.
Lessons learned from Colombia–Guernsey cooperation
This Case Study analyses how Colombian authorities recovered assets linked to drug trafficking and held in a trust in Guernsey. It sets out the legal tools and procedures in Colombia and in Guernsey that enabled Colombia’s first international recovery under its non-conviction based forfeiture model Extinción de dominio. The Case Study highlights lessons for international cooperation between jurisdictions with different forfeiture systems or even legal traditions.
The fight against criminal misuse of cryptoassets enters its next chapter.
Join us on 15–16 September 2026 for the 10th Global Conference on Criminal Finances and Cryptoassets – held this year in Luxembourg at the European Convention Centre and online.
This landmark edition will be hosted by Luxembourg’s Bureau de gestion des avoirs (BGA), alongside the Basel Institute on Governance, Europol and UNODC as co-organisers.
By J. Edward (Ned) Conway, Executive Secretary, The Wolfsberg Group
As virtual assets move into the mainstream of traditional finance, tricky questions arise. What does a reasonable, risk-based control framework look like for banks that provide services to virtual asset service providers (VASPs)? And how can compliance teams strengthen private-to-private information sharing to better detect suspicious activity?
Event
Roundtable on the rise and fall of Latin America’s biggest corruption case (CoSP11 special event)
This 1.5-hour roundtable will examine the Odebrecht case from the perspective of practitioners of a) countries that have prosecuted the company for bribing foreign public officials (recipient states); and b) countries whose public agents were bribed (victim states).
These perspectives are supplemented by the global vision of the Basel Institute’s International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) and other specialised civil society organisations that have been providing technical assistance to several Latin American countries in this emblematic case for almost a decade.
This panel explores the balance between human rights and international obligations on asset recovery, touching upon due process and property rights, and drawing lessons from the StAR publication Human Rights in Asset Recovery Processes: Lessons from the European Court of Human Rights.
Publication
Basel AML Index 2025
This is the 14th annual Public Edition report of the Basel AML Index, an independent, data-based ranking and risk assessment tool for money laundering and related financial crime risks around the world.
The Basel AML Index provides risk scores for jurisdictions based on data from 17 publicly accessible sources such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), Transparency International and the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime. The risk scores cover five domains considered to contribute to a high money laundering risk: