Anti-corruption officials in Tanzania have been upgrading their skills in specialised financial investigation topics with the help of the Basel Institute’s International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) and a local trainer certified by ICAR’s train-the-trainer programme.

Oscar Solorzano, Senior Asset Recovery Specialist and Manager of the Basel Institute's regional office in Peru, emphasised that asset recovery should be elevated to a national priority in a high-level conference panel at the Ecuadorian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 18 July 2019. 

He was speaking alongside José Valencia, Ecuador's Minister of Foreign Affairs (centre), and Gonzalo Salvador, Coordinador General de Asesoría Jurídica, responsible for coordinating legal advice within the Ministry (right).

As the initial phase of a four-year programme to strengthen Public Finance Management in Peru at a subnational level draws to a close, we are intensifying our efforts to consolidate the programme’s significant achievements and ensure their sustainability. Signed in 2015 by the Peruvian and Swiss governments, the four-year, USD 6 million programme is funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO).

The activities of the International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) in 2018 continued to have impact across all aspects of our core mission: to enable partner countries to investigate complex cases of corruption and money laundering, send criminals to jail and recover stolen assets stashed abroad.

The Thai National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) has renewed a long-standing Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Basel Institute on Governance to jointly foster the prevention of and international collaboration in the fight against corruption.

Members of the Judicial Cooperation and Extraditions of the Public Prosecutor's Office in Peru are now better equipped to recover stolen assets from abroad.

We congratulate Jersey's Attorney General, Robert MacRae QC, for his success in a landmark case that has upheld the Attorney General’s powers to obtain documents by compulsion in cases of suspected serious or complex fraud.

The Privy Council ruled in favour of the Attorney General in the Volaw/Larsen case, in which the defending company had refused to provide documents required for a fraud investigation on the grounds that this violated its privilege against self-incrimination protected by Article 6 of the European Court on Human Rights.

An exclusive interview with Elmer Chirre Castillo (photo: right), Provincial Prosecutor of the Third Anti-Corruption Supraprovincial Prosecutor's Office of Lima. 

By Oscar Solorzano (photo: left), Senior Asset Recovery Specialist and Country Manager for the Basel Institute's Peru country office.

The Basel Institute’s International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) training team held their second five-day training workshop on Financial Investigations and Asset Recovery in Asunción, Paraguay, from 3–7 June.

Experts from the Basel Institute's Peru country office trained 30 members of the Peruvian Procuraduría in a novel form of non-conviction-based asset recovery last week.