Masterclasses #IACC2024

Gerard Ryle

Director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ)

Gerard Ryle is the Pulitzer Prize and Emmy-award winning director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in Washington, DC. He led the worldwide teams of journalists who worked on the Offshore Leaks, the Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files, FinCEN Files, and Pandora Papers investigations – the six biggest collaborations in journalism history.

The work of he and his colleagues helped force the downfall of four world leaders – the Prime Ministers of Pakistan, Iceland, Malta and the Czech Republic – and prompted government inquiries and legislative reform across the world.  Many people went to jail as result of these reports, and they led to official inquiries in dozens of countries.

Under Gerard’s leadership, ICIJ has gone from obscurity to one of the best-known journalism brands in the world. He has been credited with revolutionizing the way investigative journalism is done, convincing many of the world’s biggest and smallest media companies to join forces to work together on global stories.

The Pandora Papers project involved more than 600 journalists at more than 150 news outlets in 117 countries working together.

An immigrant from Ireland, Gerard founded the investigative reporting team at Australia’s biggest newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, before joining as ICIJ’s first non-American director in September 2011.

He is a book author and TED speaker, and he has won or shared in more than 90 major journalism awards from eight different countries. In 2021, ICIJ was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Watch this Masterclass #1

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This Masterclass – How to Rock The World when you start Out With No Resources: Turning Lone Wolves into The Global Anticorruption Wolf Pack took place during the 21st International Anti-Corruption Conference (IACC) held in Vilnius, Lithuania, from 18-21 June 2024. More info: https://iaccseries.org/

From the Panama to the Pandora Papers; Gerard Ryle has been a driving force. During this Masterclass, Gerard will share his personal experience from more than a decade of turning lone wolves into the global anti-corruption wolf pack.

Cecilia Müller Torbrand

Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Maritime Anti-Corruption Network (MACN)

Cecilia leads Maritime Anti-Corruption Network (MACN), a global business network working toward the vision of a maritime industry free of corruption that enables fair trade to the benefit of society at large. She was one of the front drivers for MACN establishment in 2011. MACN has under Cecilia’s leadership grown significantly, won multiple awards, and is considered to be one of the pre-eminent examples of collective action to tackle corruption.

Cecilia is an experienced anti-corruption specialist with more than ten years of expertise in the compliance field. She has multinational experience within shipping and trade and has been responsible for anti-corruption efforts globally; trained management and Captains worldwide; implemented whistle blowing systems; rolled out country-specific anti-corruption campaigns, and conducted risk assessments, audits, and misconduct investigations. She has led and initiated public private partnerships to tackle corruption globally incl Nigeria, Egypt, Ukraine, India and Argentina. In 2015 she was awarded “Compliance Officer of the Year” by the C5 Women in Compliance Awards.

Cecilia is a member of the B20 Task Force for Integrity and Compliance and is a member of WEF’s Partnering Against Corruption Initiative. She is a guest lecturer at the World Maritime University.

Richard Bistrong

Vice President of International Sales

Richard Bistrong spent much of his career as an international sales executive and currently consults, writes and speaks on foreign bribery, ethics and compliance issues from that front-line perspective. Richard worked as the Vice President of International Sales for a large, publicly traded multinational, which also required him to live and work internationally.

For well over ten years, Richard traveled overseas in his sales responsibility for approximately 250 days a year. In 2007, Richard was targeted by the United States Department of Justice in a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) investigation and was terminated by his employer.

In that same year, as part of a cooperation agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice and a subsequent Immunity From Prosecution Agreement in the United Kingdom, Richard assisted the U.S. Government, the U.K. Government, and other enforcement agencies in an undercover capacity in their investigations of FCPA, bribery and other criminal conspiracies.

In 2012, Richard was sentenced as part of a Plea Agreement, and served fourteen-and-a-half months at a U.S. Federal Prison Camp, returning home in December, 2013.

Currently, through his consultancy, Front-Line Anti-Bribery LLC, Richard now conducts corporate workshops and keynotes to sales teams, leadership groups (including boards and c-suite executives) and compliance teams (including internal audit, finance and HR).

In person and virtually, Richard has presented to hundreds of diverse global multinationals in North America, South America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

His speaking focuses on anti-bribery, ethics and compliance challenges, sharing his front-line experience and perspective on real-world corruption and compliance risk. Richard shares his journey from corruption to compliance to raise awareness and sensitivity with respect to ethical decision making.

Richard’s clients include Volkswagen, Novartis, Airbus, Kraft Heinz and Microsoft, among other Fortune 100 multinationals and global trade groups. Many of his clients have Richard come back year after year, on a global and regional basis, for their annual leadership, compliance and sales meetings.

Richard was a former Member of the OECD, Secretary General High-Level Advisory Group on Integrity and Anti-Corruption. He is currently a faculty member of the Seton Hall Law School, Center for Health & Pharmaceutical Law & Policy. Richard is also a Contributing Editor of the FCPA Blog, and his posts can be found here.

Jonathan Taylor

Former corporate and in-house lawyer, FBI informant, key witness in Brazil’s notorious Carwash corruption mega-scandal

Former corporate and in-house lawyer, FBI informant, key witness in Brazil’s notorious Carwash corruption mega-scandal, victim of a spurious Interpol Red Notice, and recipient of the 2021 Blueprint Prize for Whistleblowing: Jonathan has had an eventful decade since he first helped unearth evidence of multi-million-dollar corruption at his former employer, Dutch listed multinational SBM Offshore, in 2012. Jonathan offers a unique insight into corporate fraud, how not to manage a crisis, cross-border investigations, and the life changing risks that whistleblowers face when they dare expose the wrong-doing of the corporate and political elite. With a degree in law and his professional qualifications obtained, Jonathan embarked on a career with a top UK law firm with stints in Cairo, London, including a secondment to Shell, and Muscat. In 2003, he joined the oil services company SBM at their head office in Monaco and rose to be the company’s number two in-house lawyer. In 2012, he was a senior member of the investigation team that discovered concrete evidence of massive top-down corruption at his then employer. Within months he had resigned, appalled by what he saw as the start of full-scale cover-up. When his fears where confirmed, he formally went public in January 2015 in Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland. In May that year, following headline stories in the Brazilian media, a delegation of Brazilian MPs flew to the UK to hear Jonathan give a five-hour presentation on illicit payments from SBM relating to the national oil and gas company, Petrobras. By February 2015, the entire board of Petrobras, once the biggest company in the southern hemisphere by market capitalisation, resigned on the back of Jonathan’s revelations and within a year, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff had been impeached, found guilty of crimes, and expelled from office.

One month after the Brazilian visit, SBM sued Jonathan for defamation in the Dutch courts, in a classic example of a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation). SBM later dropped the case after a comprehensive defence was filed. In the summer of 2020, he was arrested as he and wife and three children arrived in Dubrovnik, Croatia for a family holiday. The Interpol Red Notice had been issued by Monaco after a formal complaint of “attempted extortion” from his former employer SBM was made in 2014. He spent a year in detention, first in prison and then under house arrest, awaiting the outcome of the extradition proceedings that ensued. Two dozen British MPs of all parties openly supported his case in response to an urgent question was asked of the FCDO by his MP in the House of Commons. He has been the subject of sustained and substantial international media interest including in the UK where the BBC, The Times, The Telegraph and The Guardian all followed his plight. He has received the unstinting support of scores of civil society organizations, NGOs, pressure groups and charities across the globe. He was finally released and allowed to return to the UK in July 2021 after the intervention of Croatia’s Minister of Justice.

Jonathan has assisted the authorities in the UK, the Netherlands, France, Brazil, Switzerland, and the US, including the FBI who flew him to Washington DC following the publication of the Dutch article in which he went public. To date, SBM has paid more than US$840 million in penalties to various government agencies. Two of its former CEOs have been convicted for crimes of corruption, one of whom served time in a US jail. Investigations continue into current and former managers. Whilst stuck in Croatia, Jonathan was offered neither help or protection from any of the authorities he assisted including the UK Government. In October 2022, the Appeal Court in Monaco upheld the first instance decision that Jonathan had no case to answer. With his life now unrecognisable after his detainment in Croatia, this was too little too late.

A leading whistleblower of the twenty-first century, Jonathan is a confident and engaging speaker who has a compelling, truth is stranger than fiction, story to tale. He is happy to talk about his firsthand experiences and but also offer a thorough understanding of corruption at the highest levels of international society and how the world is ill equipped for whistleblowers.

Watch this Masterclass #2

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In this Masterclass, Cecilia Muller Torabrand, CEO, of The Maritime Anti-Corruption Network, will interview Richard Bistrong (convicted of anti-bribery offences in the US and trade offences in the UK) and Jonathan Taylor (the whistleblower on one of the world’s largest global corruption scandals) on what triggered their actions. While they stood on totally different sides of corruption, we will dive into what motivates people to engage in corruption and to report it, share their experiences and reflections on the human aspects of their journeys, linking their decisions to the legal landscape. The session will bring the audience into their personal journeys and together dissect tough to tame dilemmas. This is a Masterclass that aims to surface some unknowns with a first-hand look at “what actually happens” in the field.

Christopher Stone

Professor of Practice of Public Integrity University of Oxford

Chris Stone is Professor of Practice of Public Integrity at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. His work focuses on the leadership challenge of transforming cultures of corruption into cultures of integrity in public-sector organisations, large and small. At Oxford, Chris also chairs the Chandler Sessions on Integrity and Anti-Corruption and teaches on the rule of law.

Chris has previously served as president of the Open Society Foundations (2012–2017), as Guggenheim Professor of the Practice of Criminal Justice at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (2004–2012), as faculty director of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University (2007–2012), and as president and director of the Vera Institute of Justice (1994–2004). In 2005, he received an honorary OBE for his contributions to criminal justice reform in the United Kingdom. He is a graduate of Harvard College, the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, and the Yale Law School.

Watch this Masterclass #3

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This Masterclass – Public Corruption Turnarounds: How to Replace Endemic Corruption with a Culture of Integrity took place during the 21st International Anti-Corruption Conference (IACC) held in Vilnius, Lithuania, from 18-21 June 2024. More info: https://iaccseries.org/

In this Masterclass, Professor Christopher Stone shares his experiences of working with leaders who have successfully turned around historically corrupt public institutions. How do they do it? How long does it take? How long does a new culture of integrity last?