What is the Basel Institute on Governance?
The Basel Institute on Governance is a not-for-profit organisation focused on fostering good governance and fighting corruption and financial crime around the world. The institute’s offerings include six teams who provide different services:
- The International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR)
- Private Sector
- Green corruption
- Prevention, Research and Innovation
- Public Finance Management
- Learning, Training and Tools
Key themes of the report
The annual report, published in July 2025, features several key themes, including the multidimensionality of corruption, how education and collaboration can result in organisations being more resistant to crime, and the importance of research in identifying ineffective practices.
Country- and project-based success stories
Alongside numerous country-based successes, the report also delves into numerous transnational projects, including the FALCON research project, educational updates, and more.
Zambia: The institute worked with multiple government agencies to prosecute financial crimes, provide staff training on financial training and asset recovery, update legislation, develop national policies around asset recovery and management, and supported the implementation of the Inter-Agency Collaboration Framework for Asset Recovery.
Peru: The institute assisted prosecutors in asset recovery work, co-organised a prosecutor conference, provided a virtual course on combatting corruption in the timber trade, and launched the next four-year phase of its public finance management program, Programma GFP Subnacional.
Moldova: The Prevention, Research and Innovation team undertook research to identify sources of corruption and degraded trust that could be reformed and created a platform to foster dialogue between the private and public sectors.
Malawi: A collaborative research project was undertaken to identify corruption risks in the healthcare system’s emergency response program. The institute also recommended the establishment of institutional integrity committees within the Department of Forestry and the Malawi Police Service to help identify and reduce corruption risks.
Guernsey: ICAR provided support in facilitating and managing cooperation between Guernsey and Colombia in a major transnational asset recovery case.
Mozambique: ICAR assisted in negotiating the restitution of funds to Mozambique which Jersey had previously confiscated.
Indonesia: To combat sexual corruption in the tertiary education system, the institute helped build a survey whose findings (on preventing sexual violence and corruption) were presented to the bodies responsible for drafting regulations on the matter.
Ecuador and Bolivia: The institute’s green corruption team provided forestry officials in both countries with guidance on how to conduct targeted corruption risk assessments, as well as advisory work for authorities on mitigating identified risks.
Ukraine: Assistance was provided to the Ukrainian government across numerous sectors to improve its anti-corruption, asset recovery, and business integrity and governance efforts, including:
- Assessing corruption risks and regulatory weaknesses
- Developing policies and procedures for whistleblowing, internal investigations, corruption reports, staff recruitment transparency, and code of ethics training for central and regional staff
- For state-owned enterprises (SOEs), the institute modified its corruption risk assessment to better reflect the challenges that can be expected during a war
- Updating existing compliance frameworks within a new “anti-corruption programme and Code of Ethics”
- Starting the development of a new anti-corruption framework to protect the country’s forestry sector and timber industry
- Launching a pilot initiative to fund restoration projects
- Experts from ICAR assisted in “addressing six ongoing mutual legal assistance requests” and expert opinions were provided on seven cases involving illicit assets
- A training programme was provided on financial investigations and asset recovery for members of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU)
State-owned enterprises
The report drew attention to how the institute worked with SEOs to improve anti-corruption frameworks and reminded investors of the importance of ensuring companies have strong compliance frameworks.
FALCON Research Project
The Fight Against Large-scale Corruption and Organised Crime Networks (FALCON) research project, aimed at “developing novel tools to tackle corruption linked to organised crime” analysed the Port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands and Kapitan Andreevo in Bulgaria to identify patterns of “collusive and coercive corruption” used to enable smuggling, tax evasion, and more, and what strategies could be put into place to mitigate these issues.
The importance and value of collective action
A strategy that the institute feels could improve standards of integrity and provide better, fairer market conditions is the use of collective actions, where stakeholders work together with businesses. The report noted that the Brazilian president of the Business 20 (B20) backed the idea during a 2024 summit.
The idea was further validated through examples such as the positive collective actions outcome experienced by the Metals Technology Institute and anecdotes concerning successful collective actions from several countries (Ghana and Thailand) and organisations (Siemens).
A commitment to education
2024 saw numerous educational developments, including:
- Basel Learn offering courses in new languages
- Two new eLearning courses were launched: Data cleaning and harvesting and Collective action against corruption
- A new ICAR module in illicit enrichment was delivered in Malawi
- The financial investigations and asset recovery program was updated to address the environmental contexts of multiple countries
- Two new postgrad courses were announced and two new advanced studies qualifications were made available
Basel anti-money laundering index updated
The Basel anti-money laundering (AML) index, which provides information on the risk levels and vulnerability to money laundering and financial crimes, was updated to include fraud indicators.
Key takeaways
The 2024 Basel Institute on Governance’s annual report not only covers the many successes the organisation achieved over the course of 2024, it also goes into detail explaining the logic and processes of the work that it undertook, the challenges that were faced, and how its focus and efforts stayed true to its core mission of combatting corruption and financial crime whilst empowering others at the same time.
