IHR Advisors on International White-Collar Crime at the IBA Athens Conference

IHR Advisors on International White-Collar Crime at the IBA Athens Conference

Ben Keith and Cristian González Ruiz attended the International Bar Association’s 28th Transnational Crime Conference in Athens on behalf of International Human Rights Advisors. The four-day programme, convened by the IBA Criminal Law Committee and Business Crime Committee, drew criminal practitioners from more than thirty jurisdictions, and its substantive focus tracked the work the firm does at the international end of the white-collar field.

What was discussed in Athens

International white-collar crime is the umbrella term for cross-border investigations and prosecutions that follow business activity across jurisdictions: bribery and corruption, money laundering, sanctions evasion, tax fraud, market abuse, and the misuse of INTERPOL channels to pursue commercial opponents. The Athens panels addressed exactly this terrain.

Three themes will shape the firm’s work this year.

The first is artificial intelligence in investigations. Prosecutors are already using machine learning to triage seized data and to identify patterns in financial records. The same tooling is increasingly used to generate draft requests for mutual legal assistance. Defence counsel now have to test how those tools were configured, what their error rates are, and whether disclosure obligations extend to the underlying model and its training data.

The second is the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. The EPPO investigates and prosecutes offences against the European Union’s financial interests across 24 participating Member States. Its caseload is growing fast, the procedural rules are still settling, and the interface between EPPO investigations and national defence rights is a live battleground. Any practitioner doing cross-border white-collar defence in Europe should be tracking it closely.

The third is the slow erosion of the post-1990s assumption that international cooperation in criminal matters can be taken for granted. Mutual legal assistance is being weaponised by some requesting states. Extradition requests carry political colour more often than they used to. INTERPOL channels keep being misused against commercial opponents and dissidents. The defence response has to be coordinated across jurisdictions from day one.

IHR Advisors and its work in international white-collar crime

International white-collar crime work is rarely about a single investigation in a single country. A modern matter typically runs across three or four jurisdictions in parallel: a domestic regulator, a foreign criminal investigation, a civil claim elsewhere, and an INTERPOL Diffusion or Red Notice. The client needs a single team to hold the strategic picture together, while specialist counsel in each jurisdiction handles the local procedures.

We act as the lead strategic adviser. We instruct and coordinate with trusted national partners in each country where the client is exposed. Ben Keith and Rhys Davies sit at the centre of the file. Local counsel run their domestic litigation. The result is a coordinated, multi-track response that protects the client’s liberty, assets, reputation and ability to travel.

That offering draws on the firm’s three core international practice areas: INTERPOL Red Notice and Diffusion challenges, international criminal law and extraditiony sanctions advisory and Magnitsky-style work. In a typical white-collar matter, two or three of those areas are live at the same time, and the client needs a single team to run them together.

The Athens conference is part of how we build and keep that network of national partners. Most of the senior practitioners in the room defend complex white-collar matters in their home jurisdictions.

Our thanks to the IBA Criminal Law Committee and Business Crime Committee, to George Pyromallis and the Athens host committee, and to conference co-chairs Filippo Ferri and Sabine ten Doesschate. More on the IBA’s criminal law programming is on the IBA website.