Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogi.

We're talking today about the role that gold plays in illicit financial flows worldwide.

My guest is Julia Jansura.

Julia is the program manager for Latin America and the Caribbean for Global Financial

Integrity, GFI. Prior to joining GFI, Julia worked on international development projects,

focused on financial inclusion, mobile money, and education. Thank you for joining me, Julia.

Thank you so much for having me. Can you start, please, by helping us to understand what the financial

risk associated with gold is. I think most compliance professionals, and I include myself in this,

have a general understanding of the environmental and labor issues, but not the financial issues to the same

extent. What we've seen through our work on this topic at global financial

integrity is that there tends to be a lot of focus on sort of the point of extraction of the gold

and the issues that are going on there, whether it be, you know, labor issues, environmental issues,

community conflict, that type of thing. And I think, you know,

all of that emphasis is very well placed and it's important. One area that maybe doesn't get

sufficient attention in the current discussion about gold issues is sort of the financial side

and the trade side. If you extend the supply chain, you know,

really going past that point of extraction to the next stage of commercialization within the country

and then eventually exports, you know, eventually financial institutions will become involved

in the supply chain. So for those folks who are, perhaps they're a bank

and a large gold company has an account with them, eventually they may be processing payments

that are related to illicit gold. I think that there are two things that are important to

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