Vadim Kleiner (United Kingdom), Sergei Magnitsky Justice Campaign / Hermitage Capital Management
Vadim Kleiner holds an MA and PhD in Economics, as well as an MS in Computer Science. Following a successful 12-year career in equity research, Kleiner transitioned to become a prominent justice campaigner and anti-money laundering (AML) investigator.
Kleiner's investigation into the proceeds of a $230 million fraud, uncovered by Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, has led to the opening of 17 criminal investigations into money laundering across more than 20 countries worldwide. He has collaborated closely with law enforcement authorities in several countries, including the US, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Estonia, and Latvia, to bring to justice those who profited from or aided in laundering the illicit funds.
Over the past decade, Kleiner has significantly contributed to journalism by exposing global corruption scandals such as the "Russian Laundromat," the "Panama Papers," the Danske Bank investigation, the "Troika Laundromat," and the Swedbank investigation. Additionally, he has shared his insights on strategies to combat money laundering with MBA students and financial institutions.
Liz David-Barrett (United Kingdom), the Centre for the Study of Corruption, University of Sussex
Liz David-Barrett is Professor of Governance and Integrity at the University of Sussex and Director of the Centre for the Study of Corruption. Her research focuses on corruption risks at the interface of business and government, including in state capture, public procurement and bribery in international business – and on approaches to countering these risks. Recent co-edited books include the Dictionary of Corruption (2023, Agenda, with Robert Barrington, Rebecca Dobson Phillips and Georgia Garrod) and Understanding Corruption: How Corruption Works in Practice (2022, Agenda, with Robert Barrington, Sam Power and Dan Hough). Liz engages widely with anti-corruption practitioners globally, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and Europe, and has advised the UK government and the G20 on their international anti-corruption work.
Liz’s expertise is often sought by the media, including the BBC Newsnight, the Financial Times and Le Monde. Before becoming an academic, Liz worked as a journalist in the Balkans for The Economist and Financial Times. In 2022-23, she was Head of the Global Programme on Measuring Corruption at the International Anti-Corruption Academy. She has a DPhil, MSc and MA from the University of Oxford and an MA from the University of London.
Her recent article ‘State Capture and Development: A Conceptual Framework’ (2023, Journal of International Relations and Development) sets out a framework for analysing modern patterns of state capture around the world. In addition, she investigates anti-corruption practices with a current focus on transnational networks that fight grand corruption, comparing law enforcement with investigative journalism.
Michael Levi (United Kingdom), Professor of Criminology, Cardiff University
Michael Levi has been Professor of Criminology at Cardiff since 1991. His main work has been making sense of the linkages and differences between white-collar and organised crime and their public and private sector controls, intersecting with fraud, corruption, money laundering and terrorism locally and transnationally. He has major lifetime and other research prizes from the British, European and American Societies of Criminology, the lifetime Tackling Economic Crime Award in the UK 2019, and the UNODC/Al Thani Corruption Research and Education prize 2020. His external honorary roles include membership of the Law Society’s Economic Crime Task Force, of the Global Coalition to Fight Financial Crime and of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. His current and recent projects include A Public Health Approach to Fraud (https://www.westmidlands-pcc.gov.uk/fraud/); Fraud and its relationship to Pandemics and Economic Crises from 1850 to the Present; the Impact of technologies on criminal markets and transnational organised crime; and cyber-enabled fraud and money laundering projects. He is a Senior Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute and of RAND Europe.
See further: http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/38041-levi-michael
Laidi Surva (Estonia), Vice Chancellor for Criminal Policy, Estonian Ministry of Justice
Laidi Surva has worked in the criminal policy departments of the Ministry of Justice in various positions since 2009. From September 2022 to January 2023, he worked in the Department of Economic Diplomacy at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In the years 2015-2018, Laidi Surva was in Ukraine with the European Union Advisory Mission (EUAM). Laidi Surva has a PhD in public administration from Tallinn University of Technology.
Ivar Laur (Estonia), Head of data management team, Estonian Financial Intelligence Unit
Over the last 20 Ivar Laur has worked on development of risk analysis systems based on mass data analytics. He has helped to develop risk management systems in tax and customs administrations in Estonia and other countries in Europe, Africa and Asia. Ivar Laur is one of the architects of the Estonian Tax and Customs Board’s risk management system, which is currently one of the best ones in Europe. Ivar´s passion is to find messages from data and to create solutions, where data has to help decision makers at any level: from strategic to operational. Since 2022 Ivar Laur´s role has been to build up the ecosystem for strategic analysis at the Estonian Financial Intelligence Unit.
Krista Asmusa (Latvia), Transparency International Latvia
Krista Asmusa has been working as a lawyer for Transparency International Latvia since November 2020. Her main areas of focus include whistleblower protection, ethics in public and private sector, public procurement, civic engagement and combating money laundering and corruption in Latvia. Outside of Transparency International Latvia Krista Asmusa has also worked in administrative court, in governmental institution on public procurements and as an in-house lawyer at a private international organization.
Susan Lamb (New Zealand), International (Criminal) Lawyer and Former Judge
Susan Lamb is currently a Fellow at The New Institute, Hamburg, and a member of the Advisory Committee (under the auspices of Integrity Initiatives International) guiding the development and creation of an International Anti-Corruption Convention (IACC). She was a Commonwealth Secretariat-supported Justice of the Supreme Court of Belize (Criminal Division) (2022-2023), a member of the Certified Institute of Arbitrators (CIARB) and a Crown Counsel with New Zealand's Crown Law Office (2023-2024). She is a senior international criminal justice expert with rich investigative, prosecutorial, judicial support, advocacy, and diplomatic experience within significant roles before various United Nations international and hybrid criminal tribunals, as well as with significant UN and governmental consultancy experience in anti-corruption, counterterrorism and international accountability projects. She was educated at Otago University, New Zealand, and Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar (New Zealand and Balliol, 1992).
Ester Eggert (Estonia), Head of Product, Salv
Ester is a passionate and mission driven product leader in the FinCrime domain. She is currently the Head of Product at the regtech company Salv, where she has among other things paved the way in introducing the concept of collaborative crimefighting on a number of different banking markets. Her previous roles include leading AML products at Wise and helping the public sector as a consultant.
Aidan Larkin (United Kingdom), Asset Reality
Asset Reality is the world’s first end-to-end platform to seize, manage and realise physical and digital assets securely. Utilised by public and private sector organisations worldwide, the company’s expertise extends to investigating, recovering and managing billions of dollars worth of seized assets in some of the world's most high-profile asset recovery cases.
An Associate Fellow at RUSI (Asset Recovery & Crypto), he is a lecturer, consultant and subject matter expert on seized assets for the United Nations and multiple international organisations. His asset recovery career began as a criminal tax inspector and latterly as an experienced seized asset manager, where he oversaw one of the world's first sales of seized crypto.
Scott Johnston, Chainalysis
Martin Schwarz, Chainalysis
Thomas Kovacs (United States), FBI
