The Basel Institute on Governance is delighted to join the Global Coalition to Fight Financial Crime (GCFFC) in support of its core mission to make the fight against financial crime more effective. Together with her senior leadership team, Basel Institute Managing Director Gretta Fenner will chair the Coalition's new Anti-Corruption Expert Working Group.

A fresh agreement between the Office of the Prosecutor General (OPG) in Ukraine and the Basel Institute on Governance, signed in Kyiv on 2 February 2021, sets the stage for a continued fruitful cooperation on the country’s asset recovery efforts.

The agreement supports the efforts of the OPG to recover assets belonging to Ukraine that were illegally appropriated by former high-ranking officials and related individuals and legal entities.

This practical handbook by the Stolen Assets Recovery (StAR) Initiative of The World Bank and UNODC seeks to guide practitioners in the complex process of recovering stolen assets that have been hidden abroad. It covers strategic, organisational, investigative, and legal challenges of recovering assets. The Handbook also "provides common approaches to recovering stolen assets located in foreign jurisdictions, identifies the challenges that practitioners are likely to encounter, and introduces good practices".

I recently participated in a panel on the role of non-state actors in the recovery of stolen assets and proceeds of corruption at the 2020 International Anti-Corruption Conference, at which I presented the so-called “Russian arms dealer case”. The case is relatively small in monetary terms – around USD 700,000 plus interest – but hugely significant in terms of asset recovery efforts and international co-operation.