Quick guides

Mark Pieth 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.

“Follow the money!” Everyone’s talking about it, especially in relation to corruption, fraud and organised crime. But What does “following money” actually mean in this context? How do we do it in practice? And what are some of the wider possibilities? Read this quick guide by Stephen Ratcliffe, Senior Investigation Specialist, to find out.

This quick guide sets out some fundamental investigative skills that will help investigators trace even the most cleverly hidden assets.

The Basel Institute is contributing to tackling illegal wildlife trade and its negative impacts on communities, economies and biodiversity from the angle of financial crime. This quick guide by our Managing Director Gretta Fenner gives an insight into our approach and how our various areas of expertise fit together to help solve this complex puzzle.

Given the vast dimensions of the multibillion-dollar illegal wildlife trade (IWT), it may be surprising that until recently, global efforts to tackle IWT came mainly from the conservation sector. This has typically consisted of numerous donor-funded effortsto catch poachers and raise public awareness of the plight of endangered species.

Valuable as those efforts are, they do little to impact the organised crime networks, corruption and illicit financial flows that allow the lucrative illegal trade in wildlife products to continue.

Now, triggered in part by recent high-profile conferences and initiatives targeting IWT, there is greater and growing awareness of the need to involve the private sector in efforts to combat the illegal trade.

This quick guide by Scarlet Wannenwetsch, Project Associate Anti-Corruption Collective Action, explores the role that businesses can play in tackling illegal wildlife trade.

High-profile law enforcement operations against illegal wildlife trade (IWT), such as Interpol’s Operation Thunderball in July and the arrest of notorious trafficker Moazu Kromah in Uganda in June 2019, have drawn welcome attentionto IWT as a financial and organised crime and not only a conservation issue.

Yet in working to strengthen legal frameworks and law enforcement capacity in countries that suffer from high levels of IWT, we must not forget the social drivers and facilitators behind wildlife trafficking – factors that laws alone are powerless tochange.

This quick guide by Saba Kassa, Public Governance Specialist, draws on a recent Basel Institute Working Paper on Corruption and wildlife trafficking,published in the context of a multi-disciplinary programme of work focused on financial crime in IWT.