At the 8th session of the Conference of the States Parties to the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC), in December 2019, States Parties adopted a resolution recognising the relationship between corruption and environmental crimes.
Publication
Case Study 12: Indonesia: a landmark money laundering conviction in a forestry crime case
This Case Study highlights how investigators of Indonesia’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry achieved their first conviction for money laundering linked to forestry offences, leveraging institutional and legal changes in financial investigation procedures.
Key points:
This article is part of a series on careers in fighting financial crime and opportunities to learn and study with the Basel Institute. Our colleague Joseph Mihajason Rakotondramanana shares his professional journey, from the private sector and his early steps as an analyst in Madagascar to his current role as a Specialist in Financial Investigation with the Basel Institute’s Green Corruption Programme.
"The link between financial crime and environmental harm is too often ignored. All the more reason to act."
The article analyses drivers and determinants of illicit wildlife trade (IWT), targeting those factors that support the participation of individuals in poaching and transportation of wildlife goods.
Environmental criminals and their corrupt facilitators get rich by destroying our planet and its natural resources. This publication for the Targeting Natural Resource Corruption (TNRC) project explains how and why to confiscate their illicit assets – with or without a criminal conviction.
The paper investigates the role of criminal networks in fostering illegal wildlife trade (IWT), and how these relational structures interact with transnational organized crime. The paper frames these topics within the debate around the opportunistic or organized nature of IWT. The aim is to understand how chaotic behaviors can transform into an ordered and organized strategy.
This collection of insights on corruption, the environment and illicit trade emerges from the monthly Corrupting the Environment webinar series between December 2020 and August 2021.
The sixth event in the Corrupting the Environment webinar series discussed waste trafficking, a topic that receives little attention despite generating significant criminal proceeds (estimates suggest up to USD 12 billion per year). In addition to the financial costs, waste trafficking has enormous impacts for the environment, including from pollution or degradation, and inhibits development by fuelling corruption and poverty in some countries.
Published under our Green Corruption programme, this is a case study about a South African fishing company, Hout Bay Fishing Industries, that overfished lobster and other protected fish in deliberate breach of government-established quotas. The case study contains numerous important lessons for those seeking to follow the money in large wildlife trafficking cases.
Please join us and our partners at the OECD on 27 January at 13:00 CET for a multi-disciplinary panel discussion on illicit trade in natural resources.
The event is part of the Corrupting the environment monthly dialogue series, which explores creative solutions to burning issues of environmental degradation through the lens of financial crime and illicit trade.