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

I'm Alexandra Rogi, and today we're talking about anti-bribery challenges in India.

My guest is an American lawyer and partner with Kobraan Kim.

He's based in Hong Kong, but with regional responsibility, including India. He's joined the

podcast previously, and I'm delighted to have him back today. Vasu Muthiala, thank you for joining me.

Alexander, it's great to be back with you. It's really nice to chat with you about some of these

regional challenges. You're there. You're working on, how much of your time would you say you're

spending on anti-bribery matters?

Alexander, I'd say it's around about a third of my work is anti-corruption related. The other,

it's in the corruption realm. It's anti-money laundering and sanction-related work. We've seen a big uptick in that recently.

Why don't you start by just giving an overview of the anti-corruption environment in India? A lot of people listening will have had some interaction with India,

either travel or business, but more specifically on the anti-corruption landscape there.

Sure. India is interesting. I'm sure you know, as well as most of your listeners,

there's a lot of risk related to corruption.

I know your score, the trace matrix has India at 88. Other organization also rate India as a

difficult place to do business. That being said, it is a very important market in Asia,

as you know. I think it was Tim Cooker recently said that India is

what China was a few years ago. So I think we're expecting a lot of growth from India. I think this

year, the OECD projected India to have a growth rate of around 7%. So it's a very important market.

But that being said,

there are risks. And as you've spoken about many of these podcasts of yours, you know, these risks can be

associated to, you know, some very easily identifiable issues, specifically the government bureaucracy.

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