Good morning, everybody. Welcome. Im a Senior Advisor here at the csis. Its good to see lots of Friendly Faces in the audience. For those of you new to the headquarters, i know some of our panelists, this is their inaugural visit, welcome. After the session, we will be having a reception. We hope you can join us. Welcome, again. We are being joined via wide stream on internet as well as cspan. Keep in mind youre on tv as well as we are. But were very excited to not only be hosting this pooanel entitled assets. I could not imagine a better set of experts to speak to the range of past, current and future i e issues and challenges. Let me set the stage, in part, because weve gathered about two years ago. In what was happening systemically in terms of dealing with highend corruption. These issues are not new, of course. News a these are issues and regimes that will be with us for a number of years. What we want to do today is talk about an International Community in the u. S. On dealing wi
Week of november and secondly, what you see the role of switzerland not just for purposes of dealing with what may be in the Banking System and the action in this space. Where things are headed in the perspective. The form on recovery. Again, thats something that we do in cooperation with the world bank, etc. We do expect the specific result. We provide the forum to look back at the last year and on the ses us, and the tunesian case, probably they will soon be a return and a lot of the funds probably not compared with the and the case of egypt given the countrys development. Again, they are very encouraging signs and increased cooperation and we could then also go into a restitution mode soon. I think that will be the topic at the contrary. As for switzerlands role, we have received a mandate, so to speak and the un conference against the corruption. I think all of us come to realize that if you have this great instrument and its not staying put, i will give you an example. If you have
Something that is slapped together. So its being put together by people right there. I dont get the sense that this is being imported. To the extent that im wrong that this is something more sophisticated my sense is this has happened some time ago. Once the oil is refined you have testified that the assad regime is purchasing some of the oil. Some of it is being smuggled into the southern regions of turkey where you said the price of gasoline is higher than we would expect here. If you are purchasing barrels of oil at 30 or so a barrel you have reason to know this may be illicit oil. Are we doing enough as treasury of the United States to determine who the middle men are that are purchasing oil at 30 a barrel and make sure we are following that money into what accounts . That is exactly what they are doing, identifying the middle men. That is what i discussed more explicitly in my testimony. There is also a significant more diplomatic push to get the turks to do more in southern turke
I think breaking down those boundaries between different parts of government is very much something that weve seen and its translated into legislative action as well. Asset freezing recall, legislation that many countries have adopted. So a holding measure. E. U. Has done that. Switzerland has done that. Just after arab spring. A list of these persons, freeze their assets now. It is not a judicial freeze in the context of judicial action. It is an administrative freeze giving the countries time to prepare their judicial action. I think that sort of innovative legislation is happening. The civil forfeiture legislation that i think in america has been around for a very long time but in many other countries is still relatively new. You see that i wouldnt say proliferating but you see countries taking up those sort of legislations, so what we call nonconviction based legislation where you connect the asset to a crime. Typically on the balance of probabilities. Wont go into too many details
Carrot additionally. One of the things that we dont have enough of are programs or grants that encourage and inspire innovation and new practices and new knowledge about this issue when were placing all of our resources in enforcement and were not complementing that with innovation, then i think were creating a situation where we do have box checking instead of new thinking. I understand what youre saying. I guess what youre saying. One thing thats disappointing to me about this is that we depend on College Campuses for innovation for so many things in our society. You have on a College Campus i dont want to pick on michigan, although i kind of would like to pick on michigan. If you were at kansas, id really like to pick on you. Your system. You have law school. You have a medical school. You are training psychologists and psychiatrists. And social workers. You have every discipline and Academic Excellence in every discipline that is needed to come together on this problem. And you hav