march 8

The speaker provided updates on three topics. Firstly, they discussed the outcomes of the 10th session of the Conference of the States Parties, which had the largest participation to date and covered various thematic areas related to corruption. Secondly, they talked about the implementation review mechanism and the preparations for its second phase, including the progress made in conducting reviews. Lastly, they provided an update on the Global Network, which has a significant number of members and recently launched a new tool called the Directory of Open Source Registries. The speaker from the European Public Prosecutor's Office (EPPO) then spoke about the structure and activities of the EPPO, including its role in investigating fraud and corruption cases involving EU funds. They also shared statistics on the number of investigations and indictments filed by the EPPO, as well as the amount of damage and recovery orders obtained. They highlighted the advantage of cooperation between E of the plenary. We have a half-day today, and we have a lot to pack in. We are going to have some updates from our friends at the international organisations, and we are just waiting to see whether we can get the people online to join us. We will then hear from colleagues from the UNODC, from PATEF and the EPPO, and, I hope, from the European Commission as well. We will just wait for people to be online. Excellent. Good morning to those people online, and welcome to the last day of the plenary. We are going to have reports from our friends at the international organisations. And is Melanie online from the UNODC, please? Yes, good morning. Sorry. Good morning. I would like to start by thanking the Secretary for the great cooperation, and I will use my time to brief you on three fronts. First, on the outcomes of the 10th session of the Conference of the States Parties, the UN Convention Against Corruption. Second, the Convention's Implementation Review Mechanism and the preparations for its second phase. And, third, on the Global Network. So, starting with the Conference of the States Parties, its 10th session took place last December 2023, which was actually the largest COSP organised to date, with over 2,000 participants from 160 countries, including more than 900 civil society representatives. It was also the conference with the highest number of resolutions adopted among the 12 resolutions, which covered a wide range of thematic areas, several concerned topics which were tackled by the conference for the very first time, including the societal impacts of corruption, the protection of reporting persons, measures to address corruption involving organised criminal groups, and procurement. In addition to five major pre-conference events, and in parallel to the plenary sessions and the informal consultations for the resolutions happening until the very last day, a total of 67 special events were held throughout the week, including the first ever private sector forum, a special event organised jointly by the Global Network and OECD, and an event organised by the European Union with the participation of the OECD and other international organisations on strengthening the multilateral collaboration framework in the field of anti-corruption. Now, overall, the conference was a huge success, particularly in bringing to the fore the importance of the involvement of civil society, youth, and the private sector in our collective efforts to counter corruption. Now, moving on to my second item, the implementation review mechanism and the second phase preparations of the two decisions adopted by the conference. Decision 10-2 concerned the further extension of the second cycle of the implementation review mechanism until June 2026, with a view to completing at least 70% of the reviews by then. The conference also decided that the implementation review group, as a subsidiary body of the conference, should continue its discussions on assessing the performance of the mechanism, and on the scope, thematic sequence, and details of the next phase to submit recommendations to the conference at its 11th session. A work plan for the implementation of the decision will be presented for adoption at the next session of the group in June, which will be jointly held with the expert group meeting on international cooperation and the working group on asset recovery, and will unfortunately overlap with the next session of the working group on bribery. The working group on prevention this year will be held jointly with the implementation review group session held in September. In terms of review progress, for reviews under the second cycle, we have received 165 self-assessment checklists, conducted 125 direct dialogues, and completed 88 executive summaries. We'd like to thank the States for their engagement with the mechanism and will continue to support them in progressing on the reviews. Now finally, last point, I'll briefly update you on the most recent developments of the Global Operational Network and Anti-Corruption Law Enforcement Authorities, the Global Network. So the network currently has 198 members from 112 countries, which includes 29 members from this working group. The Global Secure Communication Platform is currently used in 66 countries by 160 operational anti-corruption practitioners from 95 operational anti-corruption authorities. And the Global Network recently launched the Directory of Open Source Registries, which is a new tool serving as a repository of official publicly available digital registries with information relevant to the detection, investigation, and prosecution of transnational corruption offences. The next plenary meeting of the network will take place from the 24th to the 27th of September in Beijing, China. I'd like to thank the OECD secretariat and colleagues involved with it—Leo, Glen and the regional networks—for participating in our meetings, as well as for their constructive engagement in exploring ways to make sure that our initiatives complement each other. And with this, I conclude my brief statement. Thank you. Thank you very much. Very pleased to hear from you this morning. Any questions or comments on the floor? No? Okay, then perhaps we can move on to the EPPO, then, please. Good morning. I also have some slides. My name is Dana Manuela Ana. I'm here from EPPO, the European Public Prosecutor's Office, and I am very happy to have this opportunity to speak about this new form of enhanced cooperation. I am going to address three topics in my speech about the EPPO, some general aspects, our structure, and some relevant statistics from our annual report published last week on the 1st of March. EPPO is the independent prosecution office of the European Union. It became operational in June 2021, so we have almost three years of activity. EPPO is independent of national governments, of the European Commission, of all the other EU institutions, bodies, offices, and agencies. EPPO investigates fraud involving EU funds of over 10,000 euros, and cross-border VAT fraud involving damage of above 10 million euros. We are also competent for investigating money laundering when the predicate of bank is a fraud involving EU funds, and corruption committed in a way which damage or is likely to damage the Union's financial interests. Consequently, EPPO is competent to investigate even foreign bribery if the EU financial interests could be affected. Actually, this was mentioned here before on Tuesday afternoon. About our structure, EPPO operates as a single office with a decentralized structure with its headquarters in Luxembourg. The EPPO has offices in 42 locations in the 22 participating member states. In practice, at the central level in Luxembourg, we have the European Chief Prosecutor and the 22 European prosecutors, one from each member state, who oversee investigations initiated and conducted by the European Delegated Prosecutors in the participating member states. At the end of December 2023, there were 140 European Delegated Prosecutors in active employment. The European Delegated Prosecutors are independent of national governments and national judicial authorities. Active members of the judiciary or prosecution service in their respective national systems, the European Delegated Prosecutors investigate and prosecute according to national criminal law and national procedural criminal law. They bring their cases to judgment before national courts. We operate under 22 different criminal procedural law regimes. I would also like to share some relevant data from our statistics. By the end of December 2023, we had almost 2,000 active investigations for estimated damage of over 19 billion euros. VAT fraud accounted for more than 17 percent of them with estimated damage of 11.5 billion. The proportion of investigations with a cross-border dimension remained at almost 30 percent. In 2023, we processed more than 4,000 crime reports, which is 26 percent more than in 2022. This evolution proves that the level of detection of fraud affecting the financial interest of the EU in the participating member states has significantly improved. Based on all the available information, we opened in 2023 more investigations than in 2022. The increase was almost 60 percent. In 2023, with 139 indictments filed, which is over 50 percent more than in 2022, the EDPO started to bring more perpetrators of EU fraud to judgment in front of national courts. Actually, the number is 458. It is also important to mention that in line with our focus on damage recovery, judges granted European Delegated Prosecutors reading orders worth 1.5 billion euros, which is over four times more than in 2022. In the end, I would like to stress the main advantage of EDPO's investigations, which is cooperation between European Delegated Prosecutors. I have been a prosecutor for more than 20 years, and before joining the EDPO, gathering evidence from other countries automatically meant an extension of the duration of the procedure. Now, within EDPO, cooperation is much smoother because we are not bound by mutual legal system formalities. We just assign to an assisting EDP from the other participating member states the measure which we want to be performed. This is done instantly through our case management system. Everything goes at an increased speed, favored by the interpersonal relations that have been created. You work with your colleagues from France or Croatia, for example, with whom you spend such nice time on Christmas parties. The efficiency is demonstrated by the high number of decisions to assign measures to assisting EDPs in different participating member states. Last year, there were more than 1,000 measures. Thank you a lot for your attention. Thank you very much for the update. It looks like there is a tremendous amount of progress being made in that area. There are some very impressive figures there. Any comments or questions for the EDPO, please? Thank you. We will now move on to Fasit. Could we ask the speaker to please turn on the microphone, please? Unfortunately, the speaker's microphone is off and we cannot hear him. Let me first start with our work on beneficial ownership and transparency of legal arrangements and trust-like structures. In February, the part of Plenary adopted an updated guidance on beneficial ownership of trust and legal arrangements and also approved its publication. This guidance will be up on the FATF website next week. This leads to the culmination of a multi-year strategic priority on beneficial ownership, which we started in 2022. As I provided in the earlier update, members may recall that FATF changed its standard on beneficial ownership of legal persons in March 2022. Then, we embarked on a project to update guidance on beneficial ownership of legal persons, which we completed in March last year. We also updated our revised standards on Recommendation 25, which talks about legal arrangements. That was policy work which was continuing for the last one and a half years. In February, we completed our guidance, which should provide more practical advice to countries in the private sector about how to implement the new requirements. In a way, it gels well with the common objectives of addressing financial crimes, including corruption and bribery. This is a significant piece of work which might be of interest to members. Second, our ongoing work on asset recovery standards and implementation. As I reported last time in October, the FATF adopted the revised and significantly enhanced standards on asset recovery. These standards provide countries with more effective tools to expeditiously seize, freeze, confiscate, and share criminal proceeds. After October, we started work on revising our assessment methodology. The work currently is ongoing in terms of revising the methodology so that we can assess countries against the new methodology. We hope that the methodology will be adopted in June. Right now, the text is already there and it is under consultation with delegations. The next few months will be spent in getting it right. Then, in the next round of evaluation, this methodology will be used for assessment of countries. Thirdly, we also progress our work on horizontal review of FATF members' compliance with the recommendations involving gatekeepers. Here, we are talking about lawyers, accountants, trust and company service providers. We started this work last year. The objective is to basically look at countries' compliance, FATF members' compliance with the relevant recommendations, which in our sense means recommendations 22, 23, and 28. Some relevant criteria, which relates to corruption and criminal proceeds relating to that. The outcome of this work should result into two deliverables. One is an internal report, which will provide a detailed analysis of how members are doing in terms of their own legal framework. Secondly, there will be a public report, which will highlight the high-level messages, which might be of interest to various stakeholders. At this stage, we are on track to complete this project in June 2024, and I'll be very happy to provide an updated status next time. Fourthly, in preparation for the next biennium, the plenary discussed and also approved the strategic priorities for the next biennium. This is something which is important because it provides an updated mandate to us to prevent criminals, corrupt entities from abusing the international financial system. These strategic priorities will be presented to the FATF ministers in its ministerial meeting in April, which is next month. They will, in fact, form the foundation of our detailed work programme, which will be presented and approved by the FATF in June. Very briefly, I think there are four strategic priorities which we are talking about here. The first is ensuring a successful and effective completion of the new round of assessments, which focus on effectiveness, and this is going to be a key area of our work because the next round of assessment is going to be shorter, sharper, and more focused on risk. The second strategic priority is strengthening the global network and also strengthening its effectiveness and cohesion in terms of achieving the common goal. The third is supporting effective implementation of the revised part of the standards, and here we are talking about more work on guidance, our typology work, and other such relevant projects. And finally, monitoring and responding to evolutions in finance. This is about our work on payment transparency and other such relevant screens. Finally, and last but not the least, I'm very happy to report that last month the FATF Secretariat formally submitted an application to become an observer organisation to the Working Group, and the application demonstrates our strong commitment to participate in observer in the group's meeting and also to continue updating you on our current and planned work which might be of relevance to the group. And I think the sharing of experiences and the outcome of our shared priorities would be mutually beneficial to achieving our common goals. So I'll stop at that, Mr Chair, and I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you. Thank you very much for the update and also for the letter requesting the observer status. I believe we'll be discussing that in detail in the next panel in June, but it was nice to receive the letter. Thank you. Any comments or questions for FATF, please? Italy, please. Thank you very much for this update. Just to say that I will be very much interested, above all, to follow your strategy for the next review cycle, which I understand you said will be more concise and short, etc., etc., which could be also food for thought for this Working Group in view of the next cycle of evaluation that we will have. Thank you very much. Thank you, Italy. Mauricio, please. Thank you, Chair. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for the update. Just one question. You mentioned that the next round of evaluation is going to be sharper, stronger, and more focused. Any clarification you can provide would be much appreciated. Thank you. Certainly. So as members may know that our current round of evaluation lasts for 10 years, which means the country comes up for evaluation, for example, in 2020, then the next evaluation will only happen in 2022 or later. And this was sort of creating some issues of concern about timeliness and currency of our evaluation. So in this round, fifth round of evaluation, we have curtailed the evaluation cycle to six to seven years. So the FATF members will be evaluated every six years, which means that the round of 10 years has been reduced to six years, but the FSRBs, our regional partners, have got flexibility to extend this round to seven years. So that is what we are talking about, curtailment of the evaluation cycle from six to seven years, from 10 years or more, in respect of timeliness. In terms of being sharper, this is something which we are sort of keeping in our mind in respect of the next round of evaluation so that we do not repeat the whole technical analysis, for example, which is still relevant. So the idea is that if the law has not changed, if the institutional framework has not changed, then we can rely upon the evaluation done in the next, in the previous round, at least in terms of technical compliance and focus on recommendations, which have changed since the last round, or where the institutional framework of the country has changed or law has changed. So this will sort of, you know, be more efficient in terms of resource allocation for the evaluation. And finally, in terms of, you know, focused on risk, this is where I think the discussion with countries and other stakeholders will happen much prior to the on-site visit, where we'll look at the risk profile of the country, have a discussion with countries so that we can focus on more critical risks which are affecting the country rather than trying to sort of cover everything another time. So that's how we're talking about shorter, sharper and more efficient and more effective assessment. Thank you. Thank you. Just a follow-up. And does it mean, do I understand you to mean that the FIFO evaluation process will be giving less focus to the technical assessment aspect? Thank you. It won't be less focused on technical compliance assessment. It will be more focused on how efficient we can be on technical compliance assessment. So, of course, effectiveness is the key sort of component of our evaluation, and that will remain the same. But on technical compliance, we'll rely more on the previous fourth round of evaluation if something has not changed. So we have a detailed assessment in the fourth round, recommendations have not changed, country's laws have not changed, institutional framework will remain the same. So the idea is that in that, in those scenarios, we can rely on the technical compliance part of the assessment of the previous round. But if something has changed, then for sure, we'll focus on those areas as well. Thank you. And thank you for the questions and for the responses. And as you can see, you've really touched upon something that is of great interest to the group as we start to think of the phase five process. I did wonder if you've condensed your timeframe from, was it, 10 years to, say, six years. Ours is around 10 years as well. Luxembourg aren't in the room right now. I would imagine they'd go pale if we said they were going to do their phase five any time soon, having done their phase four just this week. But I think it's something we can learn a lot from your experience, and I'm sure we'll want to talk to you a lot more about that. So thank you for your update today. A friend from the European Commission, do you want to make an update? Thank you, Chair. Yes, Francesco Valentucci, DGOM, European Commission. I wanted to just give a few updates on what we are doing on anti-corruption in Brussels. First of all, on the proposal of the directive for anti-corruption, the negotiations continue. While the Parliament has reached a common position at the end of February, which is, by the way, available online, so I invite the group to have a look, the negotiations at the Council remain ongoing, and so it takes into consideration the upcoming EU elections. I think that it's possible to reasonably start the trilogue discussions at the end of this year, with a possible adoption next year. Also, works on the rural law report continues. We received written contributions, and so we are processing with on-site visits, including not only the Member States of the European Union, but this year we also include four countries which have done good progress in the enlargement process, including Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia. Also, activities continue in the EU anti-corruption network, which, by the way, includes the participation of this working group on anti-bribery. We are processing to reach an assessment on the risk of corruption in the European Union, which will inform the future EU anti-corruption strategy. As a last point, and also related to what was discussed about more synchronisation maybe of different review mechanisms, the European Union participated, as most of you, to the UNCAC COSP in the US at the end of 2023. We organised side events, including one with the participation of UNODC, Greco and the OECD anti-bribery working group, so we thank you for this, including also IMF, OES, League of Arab States and African Union, and the focus was on better synchronisation of anti-corruption review mechanism, and also a better coordination of anti-corruption initiatives and support programmes. So, at the end of these side events, it was decided to launch a partnership forum for anti-corruption, which again basically tried to build better coordination and learn from good practices of different anti-corruption review mechanisms in order to alleviate a little bit, as much as possible, the burden on reviewed member states. So, this will be launched in the course of this year, so we thank again this group for participating in that. Thank you very much for the update. It has been great to have you here this week with us as well in your status. Any questions for the European Commission, please? Okay, I think that concludes our updates from the international organisation, so thank you very much for being here. We are going to move on. The next agenda item is the additional written follow-up report from Germany. After that, we are going to have the chair's discussion, which is a closed session. What I am going to do is bring forward some of the items that we are going to discuss in any other business and try to whizz through those, so that we can let our participant friends leave and then we will be able to focus on the rest of the time purely on the chair's discussion. I understand that people need to leave to get transport on time, so we will finish at 11.45 and fit in as much as we can up to then. If there are some parts of the chair's discussion that can be moved to the sub-group or done by written procedure, we can do that as well, but let us see how we get on. For now, we are going to discuss Germany. Okay, thank you. We are going to start with the lead examiners. I cannot see who is going first. Is it the US lead examiners? Over to you, please. Thank you, Chair, and thank you to Brooks and Sandrine, my colleagues from the United States and Japan, and thanks to Germany for their engagement on this issue. As you have seen from the paper, we have been monitoring Germany since 2018, since their Phase 4 report. There were nine follow-up recommendations that have not been instituted yet. These recommendations sought to help Germany better detect, investigate, and prosecute companies that have engaged in foreign bribery in several ways, for instance, by developing guidelines to encourage self-reporting by companies, by considering new non-trial mechanisms for legal persons, by ensuring appropriate frameworks to eliminate or reduce prosecutorial discretion in relation to charging legal persons, by training prosecutors and sharing expertise, as well as by ensuring that the sanctions and confiscation in law and in practice are effective, proportionate, and dissuasive. In March 2021, the working group strongly encouraged Germany to adopt without delay a legislative proposal that would have reformed Germany's corporate liability framework, including for foreign bribery offenses. While we recognize that the German authorities have made considerable efforts to develop a legislative proposal that sought to address this group's concerns, the draft bill that was presented to the Bundestag was not adopted before the parliamentary session expired. We appreciate that the current coalition government, as reflected in the 2021 coalition agreement, calls for enhancing Germany's legal framework for corporate liability to ensure that law-abiding companies are protected from unfair competition. So, back in December 2023, we asked Germany to provide a detailed road map in March now, so we could see the concrete steps they were taking to meet these recommendations. Germany did not provide such a road map when we met with them yesterday. They had not provided one. We highly encouraged them to prepare one by today. So, last night, they sent a road map a road map to the secretariat, which I believe we'll have on the screen shortly for everyone to see. So, we remain concerned. It's been almost six years since the recommendations were made, and adequate progress has not been made. In light of that, we would like to invite the German ambassador to come in June here to provide an update so that she fully understands the seriousness of the issue. So, now I'd like to turn it over to Dr. Imai from Japan, who I believe is joining with us on the screen. Thank you. Thank you, US. We also appreciate the Germans' sincere revision of the timeline. It looks realistic as well as ambitious. We also think that it is suitable for Germany to implement the recommendations as quickly as possible. By calling the German ambassador to the WGB and exchanging opinions between us, it would be necessary to further reform the relevant legal system regarding prevention of foreign bribery by a legal person or an organization in Germany. We really hope that this timeline will be implemented correctly. Thank you. Thank you very much to the lead examiners. Germany, are you ready to take the floor? Thank you very much, Chair. First of all, we would like to express our gratitude to the Secretariat for their continued support regarding our corporate liability reform. We appreciate the fruitful discussions and are grateful for the very experienced and helpful input we received. We would also like to thank the lead examiners from Japan and the US for the very open and productive discussions we had at yesterday's PREP meeting. So, thanks. As was already mentioned, we are now able to share timeline with you. This was possible due to very high-level decision-making on very short notice. Even though we wished to share this information much earlier with you, we are very pleased that we can present our roadmap today. We were also happy to hear that the lead examiners described it as realistic and ambitious. Let me now give the floor to Markus, who is joining us today from the Ministry of Justice, which is in the lead for the German corporate liability reform. Thank you and good morning. Could you please put the slides on the screen? Okay. Thanks. We can go right to the next slide, please. So, right after the dinner meeting in December, we updated the Ministry's political leadership on the WGB's discussions and conclusions and highlighted again the substantial overlap between the WGB's recommendations, the EU directives that need to be implemented and the corporate liability reform commitment in the coalition agreement. The report was taken note of very carefully and we also requested to immediately report back after today's WGB meeting. We were also able to move forward with our internal decision-making. This week, we discussed with the Director General, heading the Minister's Cabinet, a comprehensive scoping and options paper we had prepared and submitted. There were some requests for clarifications, fine-tuning and additional options in a number of areas, and I can explain these points in more detail if the group wants me to. This is why we are currently updating and fine-tuning our original paper and going to submit it for approval by the Federal Minister. Once the paper is green-lighted, we are going to reach out to other Ministries to consult on the identified key elements and work on spelling out the agreed options and elements in a draft bill. Relevant Ministries will include Economic Affairs, Interior and Finance. As you can see, the actual drafting work is scheduled to get started from July on, so the draft bill is going to be ready for public publication and for consultation of stakeholders in October this year. We are going to analyze stakeholder input and revise the draft in December, in order to submit a bill for adoption by the Federal Government in early 2025. Next slide, please. The parliamentary procedure that would follow looks, as you can see on the screen, the timeline for the parliamentary procedure is beyond our reach. That's up to Parliament, so we are not in a position to indicate any reliable date for it. But in any case, there is enough, more than enough time for the procedure to be completed before federal elections in fall. In order to give you an idea of the necessary steps, we prepared this slide, so the first step is for the bill to go to the second chamber for comments. Next are the adoption by the Federal Government of its response to these comments and the first reading in the Federal Parliament in the first chamber. There is going to be an expert hearing and deliberations by the Federal Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee. Parliament may then pass the bill into law in a joint second and third reading. And following approval by the second chamber, the legislation is going to be certified and promulgated and can then, of course, at the nominated time, enter into force. So that is the plan and the timeline, and I also would like to appreciate that it was called realistic and ambitious, and I think that is exactly what it is, and I would like to thank you for your attention. Thank you very much, Jeremy, for your presentation. I think it's always one of the more ambitious, challenging, rewarding and also demonstrative of the impact of this group when legislative change is being proposed. We have heard from the lead examiner suggesting that the ambassador be invited to attend in June, but I also want to ask the lead examiner whether there is any other proposed reporting on the updates of the bill beyond June that is being proposed. There is not, but I think that, perhaps, once we hear from the ambassador, we will have more on that. Thank you. Any questions for Jeremy or the lead examiner, please? Portugal and Switzerland, please. Good morning to you all. I would just like to ask Germany whether they find it useful for their ambassador to come in June, because as far as I understand, and the evaluators seem to agree or consider this timetable realistic and feasible and ambitious as well, but we will only have something more substantial between July and September, so perhaps it would be more productive to have that conversation later in the year. Thank you, Portugal. Just to remember a couple of things, we discussed in December the possibility of inviting the ambassador. I am not wanting to speak for the lead examiners, but one of the purposes of inviting ambassadors is for them to hear from us a political message, rather than for them to present what they are doing. It is an opportunity for us to ensure that the seriousness of our message is delivered to them so that it can be delivered to their capitals. I assume that what we would be looking to do is to get the ambassador here early so that that message can be delivered early, so that they have as much political momentum behind the passage of the bill as possible. I will pass it to the lead examiners, if you want to elaborate. Thank you, Chair. That is exactly right. Given that it has been almost six years, I think we feel that we have to keep the momentum going. If we wait until October, it is going to be too late, because if the results are not satisfactory in October, we are going to be way behind in April. Thank you. Switzerland, please. Thank you, Chair. Yes, I tend to agree with Portugal. When we summon the ambassador here, it has to be linked with expected results. Again, as my Portuguese colleague said, it is not sure that we have results as early as in June. Then I had a question to our German colleagues. The second slide that we saw had no time frame, time limit to it. Do I understand well that it comes after, that it starts after the end of the first slide? So it would start as early as early 2025. We can just confirm that that is absolutely right, what our Swiss colleague just said. So the parliamentary procedure starts after the ministerial draft bill was finished. Thank you. US, please. Yes, just a comment on the question. We understand that they will not have a draft bill, but in their plan it does mention that they are updating and fine-tuning the internal scoping and options paper, so to hear from the ambassador the progress and how they are tracking that, as well as discussions on the interagency consultation on the key elements, which is supposed to happen ahead of July. Presumably, we would have a good idea to be able to hear their thoughts on that process, and the ambassador would be well keyed into that discussion. I will point out that—again, correct me if I am wrong—we invited the Japanese ambassador to come and listen to us, and we delivered the message to them at the very start of their legislative process, when they did not have a great deal to report, but they still came to the room to hear from us the importance of their progress, so that they could take it back to capital. UK, please. Everything that I would have said has already been said, but I would like to support the position of the lead examiners. It is important to be able to deliver the message to the ambassador that we are serious about this, and it is not necessarily true that there is nothing to update at that point. I just want to come in and support that. Thank you, UK. We will get updates from the German delegates on the progress in any case, but I ask the ambassador from Germany to appear before us in June. Does anybody disagree with that proposal? Okay, that is agreed. Thank you to the lead examiners, and thank you to Germany. I will squeeze in a few of the other businesses while we train the personnel here. I will give you a notice that I want to try to do the summary record from last time in a few minutes. I will first invite Mauritius, who has asked for the floor to give a short update. I will come to you first. Afterwards, if you would like to gather your thoughts and notes on the summary record, I will move to that as soon as we have heard from Mauritius. Thank you, Chair, and thank you for bringing this issue ahead of time. Just to update the committee, since the last time we met in December on the legislative reform that is underway, I informed the committee that the bill that was going to bring about the necessary reform to meet the legal criteria of the Convention was before Parliament. I am pleased to inform the committee that the legislation has been adopted and was adopted on 19 December 2023, and it is going to be proclaimed within the next two weeks. That is one. Second, I am informing the committee about the Africa Law Enforcement Network that is going to be launched in April, from the 23rd to the 25th of April, hosted by Mauritius in collaboration with the Working Group and the Secretariat, as well as the African Development Bank. The purpose is to develop stronger informal cooperation among the different countries on the African continent. Twenty countries have been invited in the region, and we are looking forward for members of this committee to be present to the extent that is possible. Thank you. There is an invitation that has already been launched by the Secretariat, and the necessary information has already been provided. I thank the Secretariat and the OECD for their support in this project. The Convener—it is always good to hear about the on-going updates in the processes towards accession. Any questions for Mauritius while we are at the floor? I will cover more pieces of any of the business before I give the summary record. First, I think that we have a member of the permanent delegation from Australia—I believe that he is the deputy ambassador on the line. We want to give an update on the corporate criminal liability law. It was last reported to us in December 2023. We did not, as a group, discuss when they would come back to give us an update. I think that the lead examiners and Australia agree that the December plenary this year would be appropriate time for them to come and give us an update. If it is okay with everyone, we will hear back from them on the progress on their legislation in December. I am not seeing any objections. Thank you, Australia, for being online. I want to look quickly at Mary, because we were going to give an update on the timing of the high-level mission to Hungary. Thank you, Chair. Just a brief note that there was a room document attached to any other business item of the agenda, providing an outline of what the high-level mission to Budapest will look like, as well as an update on its timing. We had originally considered the high-level mission in June, and now it will be back-to-back with the October plenary to align with the availabilities of those delegations who have expressed interest in participating in this exercise. Thanks to them, those delegations include New Zealand, Slovak Republic, Switzerland and Ireland. Thank you very much, Chair. We have a few high-level missions coming up, so we are going to be busy. I am going to go to the summary record now. I do not think that we are going to put it up on screen, but I am going to start with the private summary record and open the floor for any comments or questions on the summary record. We have two remarks. To be clear, I will go through them one by one. I would like to start with item 5 on the agenda. I have to scroll back to the top of my document. Yes, item 5 on the agenda is addressing the Working Group's chair of potential conflict of interest. The remark regards the first bullet, where we are quite consistently stating that we talk about the potential conflict of interest of our former chair. However, in the third line, we have forgotten to add that, so we still say that we should decide on the chair's conflict of interest, and we would like the word potential to be added. Thank you. Sorry, just to clarify, you want to add the word potential? Sorry, it is the third line of the first bullet. The sentence starts on the second line, where we say procedural options should the WGB decide the chair's conflict of interest could not be sufficiently managed. We would like to add the word potential and say decide the chair's potential conflict of interest could not be sufficiently managed. Yes, that is fine. Did you have a second comment? Yes, thank you very much. Our second comment regards item 4n, so it is the follow-up to the additional written report by Poland. It is the very last sentence of the very last bullet, where we currently say that sending a letter to the new government has not been considered as untimely, whereas I believe that we had considered it untimely, so we suggest to remove the word not. You were too fast for me to find it. Sorry, the bullet is very far apart. It is the final bullet of item 4n, so it is on page 13. Can you repeat, please? Sorry, I thought you found it. Once again, it is on page 13, so it is the final bullet of item 4n. We talk about the follow-up report by Poland, and we say that sending a letter to the new government has not been considered as untimely, whereas I believe that we had considered it untimely, so we should remove the word not. Thank you. That is a very good start. Thank you very much. Any other comments on the internal summary report? Okay, so that can be adopted, and we can go to the public report. Any comments on this? I am not seeing any requests for the floor, so thank you very much. The summary records are adopted, and apologies that they have to be done at the end of the full week, when it is hard to remember what we did last time. I think that that is all the other businesses that I had. Does anybody else want to raise anything now, while we have our participants in the room? No, nothing. We are remarkably on time. We have also bought ourselves 45 minutes from any other business, so we should be able to get through the chair's discussion okay. I am going to invite Sinja, who is one of the co-chairs of the search group, to come to the front, and I would like to say thank you and farewell to our friends from the participant countries. Safe travels. Stay safe. We look forward to seeing you back here in June, and thank you for your contributions this week.