Welcome back to the podcast, bribes,

swindle or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge and my guest today

will be known to you by reputation.

Mark Pieth is Professor Emeritus at the University of Basel

and chairman of the board of the Basel Institute on Governance

and is now also running a boutique law firm in Switzerland.

For our purposes today, he's the author of Gold Laundering, the Dirty Secrets of the Gold Trade and How to Clean Up.

It provides an extraordinary insight into how the global gold market works.

And because the book refers to several OECD documents and initiatives, it's worth noting,

of course, that Mark was the inaugural chair of the OECD Working Group on Bribery and served in that

capacity for over 20 years. Thank you for joining me, Mark. It's a pleasure to catch up with you.

It's great to talk to you, Alexandra. I found this book fascinating. It's alarming, but fascinating gold fuels, conflict

to grades the environment, about money laundering. So let's just dive in. First, why did you

decide to write this book? You're a busy man. What prompted you to begin this project?

It actually started with something that had very much to do with Switzerland, the country I'm living in.

Switzerland has no gold, but it has refineries that refine between 50 and 70% of all the gold of the world.

We're talking of like 3,000 tons per year. And I thought, that's really spectacular.

That's strange, isn't it? And then I started digging into the world of gold, gold sourcing,

and of course stumbled over something that is very much about sustainable supply chains and about human rights.

What for me was a personal experience was to actually go to places that people were talking about.

I didn't want to do this by hearsay.

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