Welcome back to the podcast, bribes, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexandra Ragi, and today we're talking about corruption and compliance in New Zealand. My guest is Gary Hughes. Gary practices in an independent barrister's chambers in New Zealand and his

Trace's partner there. His advice is regularly sought for regulatory investigations and cases

and he is widely regarded as New Zealand's leading expert on anti-money laundering. Gary,

thanks so much for joining me. Hi, Alexandra. Thanks very much for inviting me.

New Zealand is famously well ranked in the major indices of corruption

and bribery risk, including our own trace bribery risk matrix. Do you agree with those rankings?

Are they accurate in your experience? Look, it's a nice thing. New Zealand seems to have a kind

of rivalry going on with Denmark most years in some of those rankings.

And I think it is, to a large degree, accurate, but there's some dangers or some things that aren't quite apparent there.

The first thing, particularly if you look at, say, the Transparency International one, it's very much a corruption perceptions index.

So you have to be mindful of the criteria and the

factors that go into that. And a lot of it is how people perceive a country that can drag in other

sort of things such as how easy we are to do business, measures such as how easy it is to set up a

company and get going. So New Zealand's a small and remote economy, obviously, and we're

very trade-oriented. So we are easy to do business with, and we have a pretty clean and good

reputation. But I do think there's a slight danger there that the perception can sometimes

get ahead of reality, or maybe turn that around. On the ground, what we see is that this country is not immune to bribery and corruption issues

and, in fact, facing many of the same risks as other nations.

So it's a great place to be and we have to protect that perception, that reputation.

But more and more you see little creeping issues that I think we

have to keep on top of the same as in many other Western countries. Yeah, I think it's always

good to hear from people who actually live in the countries because particularly the measurements

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