here, in spite of the difficult weather conditions, half of our institute is sick, so I'm

really happy that you all managed to get here. We are still waiting for one of our panelists,

Francesca Brandner, but she is in the car and on her way here, so I promise you that she is with us soon.

In the meantime, maybe I say just a few words about our co-oportment. her way here so I promise you that she is with us soon.

In the meantime maybe I say just a few words about our cooperation here because we usually

don't like to present reports that DGAP researchers haven't written on their own.

So this is an exception but we were convinced not only by the result, by the report, which

you have all hopefully in front of you or outside, but also by the very esteemed and great

colleagues who wrote it or who participated in the process of writing it or bringing this together.

So I'm very happy Ian to hand over to you so you can say a few more words how this product

kind of was produced and what brings you here to Berlin. Welcome to you.

Well, Yana, thank you very much indeed. Let me start by saying thank you very much for a warm welcome to a cold Berlin.

For me, it's a great pleasure to be here and it's also a great pleasure to get away from

Brexit London where the weather is the weather is marginally warmer but I think Donald Tusk is

discovering today that the welcome is much much less warm anyway we're very very grateful to Deg A.P for hosting us here.

This is an important project, and I think it's taken on added importance, as we'll hear

from some of our other speakers later on.

I want to say thank you also to the Open Society foundations for their support for the project.

We couldn't have done this without them, so we're very grateful for that.

And I want to thank in her absence the person who actually did most of the work on the report,

Yasna Shelik, who was then working for Transparency International,

is now actually in London,

...