Welcome back to the podcast, bribes, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexander Ragi, and today I'm speaking with Francois Valerian.

Francois is an associate professor of finance at CNAM in Paris, but has also worked in the private sector at a large corporation and with an international

consulting firm. For our purposes today, however, he is the newly elected chair of the Board of

Directors of Transparency International. Francois, thank you for joining me. Thank you for inviting me.

Congratulations on your election. It was a contested election, but you are now the new chair of the TI Board of Directors.

Your experience with TI, though, dates back many years. Can you tell us a little bit about the work

that you did with them that led up to your election in November? First of all, let me say again

that it's a pleasure to talk to you again.

And I think that we first met in my early TI years, that was probably during the ICC in

Bangkok in 2010 or around those years.

I greatly appreciate your work.

Let me tell you what I did with Transparency International and what I've done for this global movement over the last 15 years.

So I joined TI 15 years ago. I wanted to work on the fight against corruption more broadly to work on interiors, on ethics.

So I applied for a position at the International

Secretariat of Transparency International, which is in Berlin. I was hired. That was in August

2008. And in September 2008, and I'm sure that our listeners will remember, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.

And that was the beginning of the global financial crisis, which has considerably transformed the financial economy and also many things around the world,

many in the economic sphere, but also beyond economy. That was a crisis which involved a number of conflicts of interest.

And we started working on that, advocating for more regulation, more ethics in finance,

also because it was a crisis that started in the North and mainly affected the

South. It was kind of first time because a number of previous financial crises had started

in the South, and the North was teaching lessons to the South. And then in 2008, it was the country.

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