Governments are already contemplating life after lockdown and are keen to permit as many businesses as possible to resume operations, ramp up global trade once more, and to galvanise their economies as best they can - even as forecasts about global recession get bleaker by the day.

As economic activity resumes, what will be the effects of the pandemic on the health and well-being of corporate integrity standards and anti-corruption compliance? What support will companies need or want in the post-covid economic reality? 

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.

The Basel Institute has been collaborating with the OECD’s Trust in Business Initiative on an innovative project to build anti-corruption capacity in state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

Compliance without Borders is a project co-developed with industry leaders under the B20 Argentina presidency. It brings together experienced compliance experts via short-term secondments to SOEs to help them build their compliance capacity and address corruption-related risks.

Every day, an unknown number of elephant tusks, rhino horn, pangolin scales and other wildlife products – alive and dead – cross the oceans in container ships and cargo flights for use in traditional medicine, crafts and the illegal pet trade. Rare trees are felled in ancient forests and shipped out under false certificates.

They leave behind the butchered carcasses of the last remaining animals of many species, scarred and emptied landscapes, legal livelihoods undermined by corruption and criminal activity, and communities ravaged by organised crime networks.

Gemma Aiolfi, Head of Compliance and Collective Action, explains that anti-corruption compliance doesn’t have to be complicated. Even small and mid-sized companies can easily build the basics of an effective anti-corruption compliance programme.

Find out five simple things a business leader can do to raise integrity in an organisation.

Swiss politician and businesswoman Magdalena Martullo-Blocher once confronted her managers with a strange question: “What do you do when the beamer [projector] breaks down?” She was looking for creative solutions to a relatively minor problem, though this seemed to baffle her team when she asked the question.

She certainly wasn’t demanding a business continuity plan, which is on an altogether different scale compared to a broken projector.