At an event in London co-hosted by the Basel Institute on Governance and Chatham House on Monday 10 July 2017, panelists from Jersey, Kenya, Nigeria and the UK agreed that partnership, understanding each other’s systems and procedures, and informal communication between requesting and requested states is critical to successfully recover stolen public funds internationally.

A regional training workshop for the Commonwealth Africa Anti-Corruption Centre has highlighted the importance of cross-border co-operation in solving corruption and asset recovery cases.

Between January and September 2017, ICAR experts conducted a series of Train-The-Trainer (TTT) workshops for the Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau (PCCB) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The aim of this training programme is to teach local practitioners the relevant tools and strategy approaches to better investigate and prosecute grand corruption and money laundering cases.

The Guidelines for Efficient Asset Recovery and its accompanying step-by-step guide are now available at https://guidelines.assetrecovery.org. 

At the recent closure of the International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) fourth workshop in Bhutan, the Honourable Commissioner of the Anti-Corruption Bureau of Bhutan, Karma Damcho Nidup, emphasised the fact that corruption was not only the purview of the ACC: “It is our collective problem. We need to find collective solutions and we need to address it collectively.”

With a view to enhancing the investigation and asset recovery capacities of the Romanian law enforcement and justice authorities mandated to investigate and prosecute anti-corruption and economic crimes and recover stolen assets, the Basel Institute on Governance, through its International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR), has been providing a series of activities, including specialised training in financial investigation, under a project entitled “Further enhancing the investigation capacities of the Romanian judiciary by improving the asset recovery competences”.

On 15 and 16 January 2018, more than 60 financial investigators, lawyers, regulators and other specialists in anti-money laundering, cybercrime and financial intelligence took part in an expert workshop on Cryptocurrencies and Money Laundering jointly organised by the Basel Institute on Governance, Europol and INTERPOL in Basel, Switzerland.

February 2018 has seen the last iteration of the successful "Mapping and Visualizing Cross-Border Crime Project”, a partnership between the Basel Institute on Governance and two not-for-profit organisations in Romania, namely, the Journalism Development Network (JDN) and the RISE Project. 

The Basel Institute's International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) celebrated the long-term sustainability of its 2016 Train-the-Trainer project in Uganda when three selected participants conducted their first Financial Investigations and Asset Recovery workshop during 5 – 9 March 2018. These participants received certification as trainers in the ICAR approach and methodology at the end of 2016, and successfully conducted this workshop, independent of the ICAR experts, for 25 of their colleagues.

In response to the challenges facing members of the judiciary, prosecutors and investigators in curbing procurement fraud and corruption in Uganda, training experts from the International Centre for Asset Recovery conducted a five-day specialised training module on investigations into corruption in infrastructure projects and procurement.