 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Alviz de Giustiniani and I work for Philemoris International I'm responsible for the group that fights illicit trade. I'll be moderating this panel today on illicit trade a destabilizing factor for the economical development Together with me. I have three distinguished panelists. I'll start from my left Laurent Macadier. He's a former magistrate in France and now Senior advisor for legal affairs for LVMH in in France as an international company then Two also going further Carlos Moreira He's an entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of Weisky a high-tech company and before that He had a long career in the UN organization and then last but not least Jean-François Tony. He is a Prosecutor-General in France a distinguished career for almost 40 years now And also the president of the Syracuse International Institute is a name would suggest the Institute based in Sicily Italy my own country Before I give the floor to the panelists Let me just maybe set the scene a couple of pills on illicit trade I guess not everybody in this room is familiar with the topic So let me just highlight a couple of points, which I think is relevant The OECD so the organization we all know did a reporter a couple of years ago on illicit trade tried to quantify the dimension of it and they came up with a staggering figure, which is above a two trillion dollars two trillion dollars around the world is the The turnover of illicit trade, of course It's an estimate the organization the deal in illicit trade that do not publish any statistics When it comes to the sector I know better so that tobacco Around the 10% of all cigarettes smoked around the world are illicit So one out of ten is illicit and that's giving a loss of revenues around 40 to 50 billion dollars to the to the states and loss taxes So that's the first on numbers the size the second one I would like to mention that the dimension in terms of globalization You would be surprised that I don't think you can think about any product that is not trade illicitly illicitly it goes from a fishery to timber which is logged illicitly in the countries and then smuggled in other countries, but it's tobacco is alcohol is drugs or arms human trafficking human organs trafficking, so it's really a global global phenomenon and Across the whole world doesn't it doesn't know borders because products flow from one part to the other. It's very easy nowadays with Transportation containers Achieved to ship from one part of the world to the other And last but not least when it comes to the globalization the organization that deal with it are international They have operations in more than one country often or they cooperate with organization in different countries and often they also cooperate with terrorist organizations and And so that's one way that the terrorists are funding themselves Third point is the drivers of illicit trade the many drivers illicit trades But I would say that the the biggest one and it's the most obvious one and the standard one is to make money The money you can make an in trading illicit trade is huge just to give you an example and if you buy a container Or cigarettes in some parts of the world you can get it for hundred hundred fifty thousand dollars if you smuggle it in a high-priced country like UK or France you can resell it for one and a half million dollars now bits of that money you need to give it to the To the intermediaries, but a hundred thousand dollars one and a half million dollars. You don't need to be Greater mass to understand that the profit is huge So I don't want to give you any ideas in this room But you can buy for one hundred thousand and sell it one and a half million dollars Of course, you need to have some networks and organization, but the other driver is that the penalties are very low Do you ever read somebody that goes in prison for smuggling cigarettes? Very very rarely and the reason why is the penalties are low the attention of society is low politicians and law enforcement have some often bigger fish to fry so Society is not putting the right attention either Last but not least and then I will due to time I'll give the floor to the panelists I think an interesting study was done and recently and was In a comfort was presented in a conference organized by the UK that which is the UN organization for trade and development based in Geneva and the study was done by Tracy, which is an organization and NGO Specializing the fight against illicit trade and basically the study showed that that illicit trade is hampering the reaching the 17 STG the sustainable development goals and in the in all of them are impacted because illicit trade is Undermining jobs the country so which has a diverse the level of illicit trade it's undermining states because less revenues to invest in in other in other social activities Illicit radius fostering corruption and corruption that means it's fostering then Less trust in the in this in the society less in the country So it is a very interesting study that shows how illicit trade and with our related crimes like corruption and money laundering is impacting all the SDGs or the development towards the 2030 objective I'll stop it there and is that is a framework of illicit trade and I'll pass the word to my first panelist Laurent