FALCON – Fighting Corruption and Organised Crime

𝗪𝗲𝗯𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗿: 𝗘𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗰 𝗦𝗮𝗻𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗘𝘃𝗮𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻: 𝗟𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝘂𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗦𝗮𝗻𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗔𝗴𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁 𝗥𝘂𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗮 🗓 6 November | 12:00–13:30 CET 👉Join our upcoming FALCON webinar, hosted by The Quality of Government Institute, Göteborgs universitet, in collaboration with Brännpunkt Europa. Economic sanctions are both a key foreign policy tool and an instrument for targeting wealth illicitly accumulated through corruption. Yet they are often evaded. Political scientist Nikolay Marinov will discuss why sanctions against Russia have proven difficult to enforce, how evasion operates in practice, and what these patterns reveal about the limits and possibilities of sanctions against both states and oligarchs. Key topics: ✔️ How and why sanctions are evaded ✔️ Links between corruption, illicit finance, and enforcement gaps ✔️ Institutional and market factors behind sanctions effectiveness 🎤 Speaker: Nikolay Marinov, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Gothenburg 📍Format: Hybrid (University of Gothenburg & Online) 👩💻 Join via Zoom: https://lnkd.in/ehjH7inr 👉 Register here: https://lnkd.in/dn2gVGFU

Our last FALCON workshop, organised by our partner Basel Institute on Governance, shed light on “𝗗𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗿𝘂𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗯𝗼𝗿𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗿𝘂𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝗨“. Claudia Baez Camargo, Jacopo Costa, Saba Kassa, PhD and Noémi Jäger presented research findings on the complexity of corruption at borders, conducted as part of the FALCON project. Insights from their research at the port of Rotterdam and the Kapitan Andreevo land border crossing between Türkiye and Bulgaria: ⚡ Increased efforts to combat organised crime and corruption can lead to new vulnerabilities. ⚡ In the face of strengthened border enforcement, trafficking strategies and routes can adapt and corruption becomes even more instrumental in avoiding detection. ❇️ The ability to uncover and anticipate these changes in corruption and criminal strategies is crucial. Within the FALCON project, we explore how leveraging technology, establishing a system of red flags and strengthening strategic foresight can help. ❇️ Anti-corruption responses must address not only technical and legal gaps, but also consider the political and institutional environment that may sustain criminal dynamics in border operations. 𝗠𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗽? You find the recordings of the presentations here 👉 https://lnkd.in/dJuPDJ6R ➕ More about the workshop on the BIG website 👉 https://lnkd.in/dQsbC8xy The next workshop will be about money laundering and money dirtying on 2nd December organised by our partners Basel Institute on Governance and Transcrime.

Did you know what #money_dirtying is? We welcome you to join our free webinar on 2nd December to find out and learn more about money laundering and money dirtying. 💰💸 Our FALCON colleagues Jacopo Costa from Basel Institute on Governance and Giorgia Cascone from Transcrime will give insights from their investigations. Register now under https://lnkd.in/dVm2heNx

🧠 Last Monday, October 20, Xabier Etxeberria Barrio, Cybersecurity researcher 🔐 at #Vicomtech presented the third and final session of the FALCON – Fighting Corruption and Organised Crime webinar series "Auditing Trustworthy AI: Deep Dive into NaturalSentinel". 👏🏼As leaders of the #TrustworthyAI task, we’ve explored key aspects of this field across the three sessions, from attacks, defenses, and vulnerabilities to bias, transparency, privacy, and European regulations. 💡 In this closing session, we introduced NeuralSentinel, a tool developed and released by #Vicomtech to audit #AI models in terms of trustworthiness, fully aligned with #EU regulatory frameworks. 😊 A big thank you to all who joined the webinar!

Last week, our project coordinator Evgenia (Jenny) Adamopoulou was invited to the plenary meeting of the EU Network Against Corruption to discuss 👉how FALCON is contributing to EU anti-corruption objectives and 👉how the findings of the project can be integrated into the EU’s anti-corruption policy work.   The EU network against corruption is meant as an umbrella forum for all stakeholders in the EU to exchange good practices, opportunities, ideas and plans to strengthen the #fight_against_corruption across the EU. It brings together national authorities, civil society, researchers, EU agencies, and international organisations to create synergies. 🤝 Thank you, European Commission, for the invitation and the possibility to share our research findings! #anticorruption #EUresearch #FCT

Corruption at border points remains a pressing global issue, threatening not only border integrity but also the health, safety and security of our societies. It enables illicit trafficking, facilitates organised crime and undermines trust in public institutions. In our Working Paper 58, Saba Kassa, PhD and I examine how corruption facilitates drug trafficking through the port of Rotterdam. Find more about it! https://lnkd.in/d4r7Z8Y5

Our analysis of #moneylaundering schemes reveals a transition towards service provision through specialised infrastructures, also facilitating cross-national criminal cooperation.   At the #EUROCRIM25 Conference, our Michele Riccardi showed how false invoicing is becoming a key offence in most of nowadays organised and financial crime schemes, and is reshaping the relationship between mafia groups, legal businesses and foreign criminal actors. Dedicate providers offer false invoicing solutions to reduce the tax burden, move slush funds, and clean criminal proceeds. Chinese organisations are emerging as leading providers in this market, acting as money-laundering banks with an international reach, increasingly exploited also by transnational OC groups, including the ‘Ndrangheta and Mexican cartels.   To better understand this growing role of Chinese organised crime, Alessandro Corti presented a study on their organisational structures, market involvement, and social embeddedness in Italy. Using a longitudinal analysis of six criminal market domains between 2000 and 2025, the research highlights their adaptive strategies and stresses the importance of empirical evidence to counter stereotypical perceptions of the phenomenon. The initial results indeed indicate a strong presence of Italian individuals within these structures.   Among our studies on emerging international laundering schemes, Giorgia Cascone presented our research under FALCON – Fighting Corruption and Organised Crime, on the financial circuits of high-level #corruption. We analysed both the dirtying of money – through the transfer of bribes and illicit payments – and its laundering via satellite jurisdictions, showing how these flows often rely on advanced financial centres which, despite strong reputational scores, act as key conduits in a global corruption market.

Join us at our online workshop on border corruption on 23rd September and learn more about the research outcomes of our colleagues from Basel Institute on Governance Claudia Baez Camargo and Jacopo Costa ⤵️ We look forward to your participation 🚀

📩 The 2nd #FALCON #newsletter is now live! 📬 Dive into our highlights of the past few months, during which we … published our 2nd policy brief, … welcomed AFCEA-BG as a new consortium partner, … celebrated our successful interim review, … met in Rome for our 5th Plenary Meeting, … showcased FALCON at the Security Research Event in Warsaw – even earning an exclusive visit from EU Commissioner Magnus Brunner, and … convened our inaugural Stakeholder Community Meeting. 👉 Read the full newsletter and feel free to share: https://lnkd.in/e6Ba_Nyb   #EUSecurityResearch #AntiCorruption

Throughout the project we are conducting several #anticorruption trainings for representatives of national LEAs and other security related organisations. The aim is to raise the trainees' awareness of corruption and its risks, and to provide them with information to identify corruption and with methods of building corruption resistance. Typical questions are: 👉 What is corruption? (definition, typologies of corruption, scale, examples) 👉 How can corruption be identified? (indicators) 👉 Corruption mechanisms: How does it work? (actors, modus operandi) 👉 How does it affect societies, economies, governments etc.? 👉 What are new trends in corruption? 👉 What is the international impact of corruption? 👉 What can be done to prevent corruption? The workshops are conducted either in English or the national language, online or on-site. On the photos you can see the trainings of our partner GPI (General Police Inspectorate of the Republic Moldova) from May this year and December 2024 at their premises. Sławomir Śnieżko, Ianolina Furculita #FALCON #lawenforcement #anticorruption_training #FCT