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

I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today we're revisiting the topic of the impact of corruption on the world's natural resources and specifically our threatened wildlife.

My guest today is Olivia Swap Goldman.

Olivia is executive director of the Wildlife Justice Commission.

Her experience in anti-corruption spans the globe from the International Criminal Court

to the UN International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia.

Olivia, thank you for joining me.

Thank you for having me.

Your organization was established to fight

organized wildlife crime. What role does corruption play in this illicit trade? Corruption is

absolutely essential to the illegal wildlife trade. It's the biggest enabler of all forms of wildlife crime. It's been called the air that wildlife crime

breathes because it's so permissive and overall and it just absolutely impacts wildlife crime to such an

extent that if we didn't have corruption, we would not have wildlife crime. I can give you some

examples. We recently did a report on the trafficking of

Rhinohorn over 10 years. It's a threat assessment. So what it does, it looks back over 10 years and

what have we done really well in combating the trafficking of rhino horns? And what haven't we done

quite as well? And where are the gaps? And in doing that, we found a couple things that relate to corruption.

One example is that one-third of all rhino horns that are trafficked through Oro-Tombo Airport in South Africa are done so unconcealed.

And what that means is that the traffickers are so confident in their corrupt

enablers, they're not even bothering to hide the horns. And everything gets viewed in the airport.

So they're really confident that their corrupt enablers are working so well that they don't

even need to bother to hide it. We've also seen examples of park rangers that get tip-offs,

...