Foreign Affairs committee  No, that's fine. I must admit that I don't really have much to add. I perfectly agree with everything that Gerry said. I will only say that the issue I would like to bring up in the asset recovery context is that of where the money goes and who has actually suffered, whether we

Foreign Affairs committee  Sure. I also need to point out that I have a flight to catch. Yes, this is astonishing, and that's where the banking industry was at that time. I don't think this could happen today anymore, especially with the Abacha case. It's so blunt and banal. It's so cash-oriented. It's no

Foreign Affairs committee  You chose the not-so-good examples, but you.... They are worth talking about, and they are the cases we often cite in order to convince the international community, and especially the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which is reluctant to develop guidelines for this effo

Foreign Affairs committee  That's exactly the case I was referring to. That's not the traditional case of corruption like General Abacha, who stole from the treasury and stashed it somewhere else. This is a foreign bribery case, in which the jurisdiction that leads the foreign bribery investigation will en

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you. I think what you're referring to is probably the freeze under the constitution, which has now actually been put into regular law. Originally the Swiss constitution allowed for the federal council to freeze assets immediately if they could be considered a concern to it

Foreign Affairs committee  The $1.1 trillion—it's hard for me to imagine these figures—is an estimation by the global financial integrity initiative, and that includes the so-called illicit flows. This may be legally earned money that leaves a country for tax evasion purposes, as well as proceeds of corrup

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you for the question, Ms. Laverdière. If I may, I will answer in English. It will be easier for me. Thank you very much for the question. This is something I'm very passionate about. It's an unsolved issue, but I certainly am also flabbergasted to hear that only 25% was r

Foreign Affairs committee  —but if the case was solved or closed in a domestic Canadian investigation for money laundering, the situation, technically and legally speaking, presents itself differently. In that case Canada, legally, under the treaty, has the possibility of only giving back 25%, but politica

Foreign Affairs committee  Practically, what we see—and as I said, we work with law enforcement pretty much around the world—is that the challenge still is that although police are investigating corruption, they oftentimes do not actually trace assets. People may go behind bars and after 10 years come out

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you. A person relating to the—

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much. I think the Magnitsky Act is probably an important symbolic act. I'm not entirely sure it will have a massive consequence in the broader scope in terms of all of a sudden stopping a huge amount of illicit international flows of assets. In terms of sending th

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. I'm not a lawyer. My disclaimer, however, is the same, and I'm not even Canadian, so I'm certainly no specialist on the Canadian criminal law. I speak to you from the perspective of a not-for-profit organization based i