Jersey recently announced the successful conclusion of a 10-year asset recovery case against an Indonesian company director convicted of fraud, embezzlement and money laundering, and which involved a luxury apartment in Singapore held through a Jersey trust. H.M.

Within days of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, Western governments imposed unprecedented economic sanctions against the Russian state and certain Russian oligarchs. They are now working to identify and freeze assets linked to sanctioned individuals and entities – a magnificent challenge in itself.

We have just released a detailed case study on the prosecution of a South African fishing company, Hout Bay Fishing Industries, and efforts to recover the company's illicit assets.

Published under our Green Corruption programme, the case study is authored by Advocate Caroline Dutot of Ardent Chambers, Jersey, with contributions from Howard Sharp, QC. 

We congratulate Jersey's Attorney General, Robert MacRae QC, for his success in a landmark case that has upheld the Attorney General’s powers to obtain documents by compulsion in cases of suspected serious or complex fraud.

The Privy Council ruled in favour of the Attorney General in the Volaw/Larsen case, in which the defending company had refused to provide documents required for a fraud investigation on the grounds that this violated its privilege against self-incrimination protected by Article 6 of the European Court on Human Rights.

The Framework for the Return of Assets from Corruption and Crime in Kenya (FRACCK), agreed and signed by the Governments of Kenya, Jersey, Switzerland and the UK in 2018 with support from the Basel Institute's International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR), is already generating strong interest for its "innovative" and "novel" approach to asset return.

These were the words of Brigitte Strobel-Shaw, Officer-in-Charge of the Corruption and Economic Crime Branch of the UNODC, during a May 7-9 International Expert Meeting on the Return of Stolen Assets.