Thank you.
Yes, the Global Fund has always stated that we have absolutely zero tolerance for corruption, but at the same time we do know that we are investing our money in countries where there's a significant risk of corruption. That was exactly what this high-level panel report was about: to advise us on how we can best minimize this risk of corruption. You need some very clear control measures to kind of minimize that risk as much as possible.
We have already been using several levels. In every country where we invest, we employ so-called local fund agencies and our international auditing firms that are kind of a level of control at the country level, and then we have the Office of the Inspector General, that Mr. Samson talked about, that goes with teams of auditors and investigators into countries if we have any indication of fraud and corruption.
We have a whistle-blower policy. Anybody who detects any kind of irregularities can anonymously alert the inspector general to that. That's exactly the reason why we do detect a lot of cases of corruption at the country level. We then react immediately by suspending funding, by changing the principal recipients. We also have a number of judicial cases in a number of countries now, because we do not tolerate that kind of behaviour.
I think it is indeed a kind of common effort, I would say, among the Global Fund, the board, the bilateral agencies, and the multilateral agencies, to work together on the best possible mechanism to reduce this risk. We believe that one of the main and the best tools for that is indeed, transparency: make your disbursements very transparent, and where you detect irregularities, report about that, because that will also deter others from contemplating similar behaviour.