Before joining the Basel Institute’s International Centre for Asset Recovery, Tom Walugembe was a Senior State Attorney at Uganda’s Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. In this role, he secured the first ever money laundering conviction in Uganda in the case of Uganda v Serwamba David Musoke and 6 Others.
This landmark case blazes a trail not just for Uganda but for other countries to prosecute cases of money laundering and recover illicit assets.
Law enforcement officers from Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Djibouti, Tanzania and South Sudan last week worked together to solve a simulated investigation aimed at confiscating “laundered” cryptocurrency – entirely online.
“Unprecedented” comes up again and again in commentaries on covid-19. But as I listen to more of my colleagues’ and other experts’ reflections on corruption in relation to the pandemic, it strikes me that we’ve seen many of the same features and corruption risks before.
Mark Pieth, Founder of the Basel Institute on Governance and author of the book Gold Laundering, offers an insight into the risks of human rights and environmental harms in gold supply chains. Where are the risks and responsibilities?
Collective Action with gold refiners, suppliers and other stakeholders, he concludes, can help to clean up the industry.
Law students at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa were surprised when a two-day course on corruption and money laundering by Professor Mark Pieth and Kathrin Betz turned out to involve acting out roleplays and working on a simulated money laundering case.
Acting as prosecutors, defence lawyers and judges, the students first had to resolve a corruption case by applying the UN Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC).
Russia’s risk level in the Basel AML Index has hit a record low following a December 2019 Financial Action Task Force (FATF) assessment that rated the country’s anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing (AML/CFT) systems as reasonably effective.
Financial investigations are critical to proving crimes such as corruption, fraud and trafficking in humans or illicit goods. They are also central to confiscating illegally obtained assets from criminals – so that crime doesn’t pay.
Yet there is often confusion about who performs financial investigations, how, when and why, as well as their relationship to criminal investigations. All of these questions are further complicated by the fact that different countries have different legal systems, different laws and different terminology.
Manuel Medina, specialised Intelligence Analyst for our Illegal Wildlife Trade programme, sets out the basics of intelligence analysis and why we do it. Key questions are:
This quick guide to cryptocurrencies and money laundering investigations addresses the use of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Monero to facilitate serious crimes or to launder stolen money. It was originally published in March 2019 and updated in August 2023.
It explores, in brief:
A French version of Corruption and Money Laundering in International Arbitration: A Toolkit for Arbitrators has just been published. You can download the toolkit in English, Russian and French (Corruption et blanchiment d’argent dans l’arbitrage international – Boîte à outils pour les arbitres) here.