ZURICH: Mark Pieth, aged 59, has been professor of criminal law and criminology at the University of Basel, Switzerland since 1993. Having completed his undergraduate degree and his PhD in criminal law and criminal procedure at Basel  university, he spent an extensive period of time abroad,  notably at the Max Planck Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology in Germany and the Cambridge Institute of Criminology in the United Kingdom.

According to his department’s website Pieth, after practising as a private barrister, returned to Basel to complete his post-doctoral  thesis on sanctioning and other aspects of criminology.

From 1989 to 1993, Pieth was head of section (economic and organised crime at the Swiss Federal Office of Justice (Ministry of Justice and Police). In this role, he drafted legislation against money laundering, organised crime, drug abuse, corruption and the confiscation of assets. As a government official and later as an independent consultant, he also acquired extensive experience in international fora, amongst other things, serving as a member of the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering, as a member of the Chemical Action Task Force on Precursor Chemicals and as chairman of an intergovernmental expert group charged by the United Nations with determining the extent of the illicit traffic in drugs.

Since the mid-1990s, Pieth has undertaken a range of functions at the international level. Since 1990, he has chaired the OECD Working Group on Bribery in International Business Transactions, also participating in the Wolfsberg AML Banking Initiative. In the spring of  2004 he was appointed by the UN Secretary General to the Independent Inquiry Committee into the Iraq Oil-for-Food Programme. More recently, in autumn 2008, Pieth was made a member of the integrity advisory board of the World Bank Group (IAB), advising the president of the bank and the audit committee on integrity issues.

Within Switzerland, Pieth has assumed various presidencies and memberships of national commissions, including the expert group of the National Research Programme on Violence and Organised Crime, the Federal Commission on Data Protection in the Medical Profession, the Swiss Federal Gaming Commission and a consultative commission to the Federal Administration of Finances on the prevention of money laundering.

He continues to consult corporations, international organisations and foreign governments on issues related to governance and to publish extensively in the field of economic and organised crime, money laundering, corruption, sanctioning and criminal procedure. He has served as Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Basel.

Independent Governance Committee membership

Mark Pieth (chairman)

José Luis Astiazarán

Lord (Peter) Goldsmith

Leonardo Grosso

Sunil Gulati

Carlos Heller

Michael Hershman

Guillermo Jorge

Seung-Tack Kim

James Klotz

François Morinière

Lydia Nsekera

Alexandra Wrage

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