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Away from the dominant headlines now flowing from the Pandora papers, is the news that UK publicly listed Petrofac had paid a USD 105 million (GBP 70 million) fine for corruption in the Middle East. The corruption scandal has been in the news for some years...

In due diligence time is of the essence. Why is time such an inescapable element of due diligence ? A key principle of performing due diligence is that business delayed is business lost. Venture capitalists performing due diligence on investment targets know this...

The cost of compliance is a perennial topic. HSBC is not alone in having years when compliance costs have climbed as profits fell. In one quarter alone of 2017 regulatory compliance costs rose by 12% to GBP 620 million. Part of that was the hire of an additional...

At least three official reports on matters related to Greensill have been published in July, namely an interim report by the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, the Treasury Select Committee Report and thirdly the Nigel Boardman Independent...

The Colonial pipe-line ransomware attack earlier this year, and the FBI’s laudable success in recovering a large portion of the ransom paid, kept the focus on yo-yoing crypto currencies - whose year so far has been in Chaucer’s words, “Now up, now doun as boket in...

A member of a compliance What’s App group to which I belong posed the question, “what happens if doubts arise about the accuracy of due diligence data ?” A good question without an easy answer. But I shall do my best. For most of us due diligence is a thing we do...

In an earlier report we noted the potential for the British government to be perceived as beholden to the influence of foreign money.  Calls for greater donor transparency have gone largely unheeded, and the use of political donations is currently under scrutiny at...

These are interesting times in the Czech Republic. The country has been hit hard by coronavirus, with high infection rates leading to drastic new lockdown restrictions in recent days. Health minister Jan Blatný has warned that the crisis threatens to overwhelm...

One of the significant economic impacts of Covid-19 has been the extent to which national protectionism sentiment has been boosted. In the pre-Covid world of economic expansion, supply chains were run on a “just in time” basis, often at the expense of the...

The Transparency International (TI) “Exporting Corruption” report is compelling reading. Published at the end of last year it highlights some of the global challenges facing the fight against cross-border corruption. Its premise is that countries widely seen as...