Ladies and Gentlemen it is fantastic to see you all, thank you for coming to support International Fraud Group November networking cocktail. It’s wonderful to be able to link up with a charity that the very, sort of essence of what they do is the essence of what all of us here do. We go after bad guys and we give them a good kicking.
Tonight is the culmination of two days’ worth of meetings of the International Fraud Group and this evening is a networking opportunity for all of the members to meet the members of the community that are involved in asset recovery and international investigations.
It’s been so nice to see each other after two years of having to meet virtually. A lot of new members to the IFG, so it’s great to meet faces and to speak to people that we just haven’t been able to speak to before.
It is the first time since the IFG was born twenty seven years ago that we are applying our resources, our creativity and our time to a charitable purpose which is to stop trafficking.
Stop The Traffic is a global organisation that fights to prevent and disrupt human trafficking. Mishcon and Gary and the International Fraud Group is critical in the ability to achieve our goal. Because, to stop the traffic, we have to understand trafficking, people trafficking is the buying and selling of people and in the end, anyone does that, because they want to make money.
I think the whole area of financial and human crime are closely interlinked and so, one of the reasons, I’m really here is to help the fraud area understand just how big trafficking crime is and the fact that probably the perpetrators are very strongly overlapping.
A partnership with International Fraud Group, Mishcon and Stop The Traffic along with the other partnerships around technology and enforcement, NGO’s, Civil Society, Government, business, financial institutions, all the ones that we are gathering around this ability to collect information, analyse and start to see predictively the patterns that are happening and then take action.
What’s next for the IFG well, I think we’re going to continue to go from strength to strength. We’ve added almost ten new members in the last twelve months, even during the pandemic and we’re growing our presence in Asia and in Latin America and hopefully we will grow further in the Middle East and in Europe. So it is very exciting times.
We are now, have got, the critical mass for really convincing the market place and particularly Governments and NGO’s and organisations like the World Bank, that we are the number 1 international asset recovery organisation and that they can trust us to conduct world-wide asset recoveries and produce a result for them.