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.
Our partners and team of asset recovery specialists in Mozambique are celebrating the entry into force of a new law on asset recovery. It significantly extends Mozambique’s capability to recover illicit assets arising from corruption and other criminal activity.
** Update: After this blog was published, FinCEN announced an extension to the comment period for the proposed regulation on transactions to and from so-called unhosted wallets. See details here.**
We are delighted about the signing of a trilateral agreement on the return of illicitly acquired assets to Peru.
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.
Twenty anti-corruption investigators and financial intelligence analysts from 10 African countries completed an intensive Advanced Operational Analysis course last week hosted by the Commonwealth Africa Anti-Corruption Centre (CAACC).
Peru’s Attorney General’s Office has recorded another successful use of its non-conviction based confiscation law, extinción de dominio, to recover stolen assets from abroad.
The case involves around USD 8.5 million plus interest frozen in a bank account in Switzerland since 2004. The assets derived from contracts for the purchase of overvalued MiG-29 and Sukhoi Su-25 aircraft during the government of Alberto Fujimori.
This speech was given at a preparatory meeting for the UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) against Corruption in 2021.
It deals with non-conviction based confiscation as a method to recover assets stolen through corruption, and how challenges in international cooperation in these cases can and should be overcome.
See Spotlight on non-conviction based confiscation at UNGASS preparatory meeting.