A fundamental priority for law enforcement authorities dealing with financial crime is to recover illegally obtained assets and deny criminals access to the proceeds of their crime. The recovery of illegally obtained assets, however, requires first to successfully trace them.
Corruption is one of the endemic evils in today’s world. The phenomenon has negative impacts on world poverty, democratic governance, progress and development. According to the World Bank, USD 20 to 40 billion is lost annually by developing nations because of corruption. With the adoption of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC), the international community aims at setting up a comprehensive global framework to contain and ultimately lower significantly the levels of corruption worldwide.
Street protests in the ‘Arab Spring’ countries have illustrated that public demand for recovering stolen assets has grown exponentially, as have expectations by concerned populations and governments. From a topic discussed in expert forums, it has thus become a topic of the people. The question is: Have practitioners and policy makers delivered on these expectations?
Non-state actors are of fundamental importance in the prevention and combating of corruption within asset recovery processes. Their roles and responsibilities were considered during an experts’ meeting hosted by the Basel Institute on Governance and the International Anti-Corruption Academy in September 2010.
This book contains essays presented at the seminar written by practitioners and academics with extensive experience in the field of CTF. The authors offer a diversity of views on the domestic, regional and international initiatives aimed at detecting terrorist funds in the financial system, preventing terrorists from moving their money via alternative financial channels and facilitating the recovery of terrorist assets.
In the context of the SUGAR project (“Strengthening Uganda’s Anti-Corruption and Accountability Response”) project, funded by the UK Department for International Development, experts from the Basel Institute’s International Centre for Asset Recovery conducted its first training workshop in early July 2016 as part of an extended train-the-trainer learning programme.
At the opening session of the recent High Level Conference on Illicit Financial Flows: Interagency Cooperation and Good Tax Governance in Africa (Pretoria, South Africa, 14 to 15 July 2016), the South African Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan highlighted that Africa continues to lose large sums of money annually as a result of illicit financial flows estimated at USD 50 billion every year; the application of complex ownership structures has become the most commonly used means of hiding ownership of assets.
The International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) has further expanded its operational engagement in South America partnering with Paraguay where ICAR experts, in partnership with the Ministerio Público (Public Prosecutor’s Office) of Paraguay, conducted a 5-day training programme in financial investigation and asset recovery in Asunción from 25 to 29 July 2016.
At the opening ceremony of the second Financial Investigations and Asset Recovery training workshop in Uganda during August 2016, the Inspector General of Government, Lady Justice Irene Mulyagonja, emphasised the importance of hitting those convicted of corruption where it hurts most: in addition to imprisonment, illicit assets had to be confiscated as this was essential for the anti-corruption fight to be meaningful.
Today, Europol, INTERPOL, and the Basel Institute on Governance have formalised the establishment of a tripartite partnership for a working group on money laundering with digital currencies. The working group will aim to: