For those who are not at the 3rd Global Conference on Criminal Finances and Cryptocurrencies today and tomorrow, here is a taster – opening remarks by Federico Paesano, Senior Financial Investigation Specialist at the Basel Institute on Governance, which is co-organising the event.
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Asset recovery refers to the process by which the proceeds of crime are identified, traced, seized, confiscated and returned to their rightful owners. Generally speaking, States need to lead the process of recovering stolen assets.
However, civil society organisations (CSOs) can play an important role in the different stages of the asset recovery process.
This guide:
These practical guidelines are a set of international good practices intended to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of requesting and requested states in the asset recovery process.
Asset recovery is an intricate and time-consuming process. The guidelines unravel the asset recovery process, breaking it down into practical, manageable guidelines, allowing a targeted audience to focus on the asset recovery process in a comprehensive manner.
Field experts from our International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) supported the EU – Action Against Drugs and Organised Crime (EU-ACT) programme last week in a conference for Tanzanian law enforcement officers and prosecutors.
Peruvian prosecutors in the city of Trujillo have received innovative hands-on training in Asset Recovery via the Mechanism of Expired Ownership ("extinción de dominio" in Spanish). The training was aimed at prosecutors specialised in cases of corruption and money laundering. It was carried out with the support of the Swiss SECO-funded Subnational PFM programme implemented by the Basel Institute’s office in Lima and the Basel Institute's International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) training division.
The Basel Institute's Vice-President, Prof. Dr. iur. Anne Peters, has published an illuminating paper on "Corruption as a Violation of International Human Rights".
Published in the European Journal of International Law, the article asks two basic questions:
Peters' clear writing and examples make this an essential read for anyone concerned about corruption, human rights and the link between the two.
States perceived to be highly corrupt are at the same time those with a poor human rights record. International institutions have therefore assumed a negative feedback loop between both social harms. They deplore that corruption undermines the enjoyment of human rights and, concomitantly, employ human rights as a normative framework to denounce and combat corruption. But the human rights-based approach has been criticized as vague and over-reaching.
This article illustrates an early example of corporate Collective Action, the Wolfsberg Group, and charts its development from its inception, in 1999, up to 2012. The Wolfsberg Group is an association of eleven banks that took its name from the Château Wolfsberg where the banks held their first meetings and where they continue to hold their annual forum.
Within the context of a three-year initiative on "Mapping and Visualising Cross-Border Crime” funded by the Swiss-Romanian Cooperation Programme and launched in 2014, experts from the Basel Institute’s International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) and the Journalism Development Network (JDN) conducted their 6th and final workshop on Financial Investigations and Asset Recovery – “Follow the money” in February 2019.
The European Commission has released a new list of 23 “high-risk third countries” with weak anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (AML/CFT) frameworks.
This means that banks and other entities subject to the EU’s AML rules will have to apply increased due diligence in relation to customers and financial institutions from these countries.