Hello, welcome back to M-Mex's weekly podcast.

I'm James Panicki, Asia-Pacific Senior Editor, and I'll be your host for the next 25 minutes or so.

Today, it's wall-to-wall anti-bribery and

corruption with a couple of very interesting stories. A bit later on, Martin Coyle will walk us through

the court case unfolding in the UK involving the Eurasian Resources Group, the Kazakh Mining

Company, and it's not what you might think. The ENRC is taking on both

the UK's serious fraud office and the company's former lawyer over the relationship between

those two in the course of an ongoing fraud investigation. It's a fascinating sidebar issue to a

much larger case, and it tells us something about the risks associated with

this area of enforcement, as well as the risks of providing legal advice in serious corruption

investigations. First up, though, beneficial ownership registers. They've become the new must-have

for the international community. A recent UN meeting has seen several

countries commit themselves to ledgers that show who owns what, something that ultimately

allows for a level of accountability when crimes are committed by shell companies with unclear

ownership arrangements. But getting all jurisdictions onto the same page

is a Sisyphian task. M-Mex has published a fine piece of analysis on this issue with reporting

from both sides of the Atlantic and we'll speak to Annie Robertson in London in just a moment.

First up, though, we're joined by Robert Thomason from the M-X Bureau in Washington,

D.C. Robert, firstly, thank you for putting this all together, but let's maybe start with

defining an ownership registry and maybe give us a sense of why large companies are starting

to pay more attention to this regulatory tool?

Well, beneficial ownership registry is a database established by a government agency or authority

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