Basel Institute on Governance 196d ago

Grand corruption schemes often involve politically exposed persons and influential business actors who exploit global financial systems to move, disguise and repurpose illicit assets. Detecting these cross-border networks – whether as an investigator, journalist or researcher – requires a clear understanding of how illicit financial flows operate. This webinar explores two mechanisms at the core of grand corruption: 1️⃣ Money laundering – widely known, yet increasingly complex in a globalised financial system. 2️⃣ Money dirtying – a lesser-known process in which legal funds are covertly transformed into bribes or illicit resources. In Part I, Dr Jacopo Costa breaks down how grand corruption schemes use both money dirtying and money laundering to move and disguise funds. He illustrates these mechanisms through the Odebrecht bribery scheme involving former Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo, drawing on rare primary documents from the Lava Jato (“Car Wash”) investigation. Dr Costa explains how: 💰 Clean money from public contracts is “dirtied” into bribes ⛓️ Offshore companies, shell firms and intermediaries create complex, opaque chains 🧾 Odebrecht’s Department of Structured Operations coordinated hidden payments 👉 Part II, led by Giorgia Cascone, takes a broader perspective by analysing patterns across 42 grand corruption cases and identifying common transaction channels, intermediaries and cross-border financial structures. 👉 Watch Part II with Giorgia Cascone here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O9D_zUJmkM Speakers: Noémi Jäger, Associate, Prevention, Research and Innovation, Basel Institute on Governance (moderator) Dr Jacopo Costa, Senior Specialist, Prevention, Research and Innovation at the Basel Institute on Governance Giorgia Cascone, Researcher at Transcrime ⏱️ Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 02:27 Defining money dirtying vs money laundering 06:09 Money dirtying and terrorism financing 10:28 Money dirtying and corruption 15:42 Similarities between money dirtying and money laundering 18:04 The Odebrecht case 38:08 Discussing empirical findings