What are best practices to promote transparency and accountability in the return of stolen assets?
This was the focus of a side event of the G20 Anti-Corruption Working Group on 9 October 2019 at the OECD headquarters in Paris. The event gathered authorities and experts from the G20 countries plus international organisations including the World Bank and United Nations.
This Working Paper aims to contribute to the international policy dialogue on the link between asset recovery and countries’ pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals.
It contends that supporting countries in recovering stolen assets and promoting sustainable development are mutually reinforcing. It also aims to correct the false reputation of asset recovery as a very technical legalistic field of development cooperation, and to generate broader understanding of the far-reaching role that asset recovery can play to foster development.
This Working Paper presents findings from a research project that sought to better understand decision-making processes on the return of illegally obtained assets using the examples of past cases of returning assets that had been stolen from Kazakhstan, Peru and the Philippines.