 Good afternoon. Good morning. My name is Johnston Makubu from the South African Revenue Service. It gives me great pleasure to have you here as we explore hidden wealth and we will have quite a number of speakers or presenters that will share some very interesting insights from research that has taken place across jurisdictions. I think it's important as I open up this session that generally I indicate that we had quite a number of discussions yesterday that will cross-pollinate with the papers that are presented here today. There was some insights that came out of the UK in terms of real estate and you will see that there will also be presentation today around issues that pertain to real estate in as far as Dubai's consent, but also earlier on this morning in the opening session much was said about evasion and this session will touch a little bit on that. If I just share from the South African context as we continue to look at hidden wealth, a number of things that we have started to do that I think are important just to kick off from a tax administration perspective. We started to really focus on creating a segmented focus on high wealth individuals in the South African context by setting up a unit that looks at specific individuals that have been profiled to fall within that particular segment with a view of broadening the base but also ensuring that the revenues that are supposed to come through to the tax administration are indeed received. We've done some work as well at the back of the Panama Papers where we saw quite a number of South Africans that were featured in those leaks and not only the Panama Papers but subsequent leaks and some audit work that have since started have yielded quite significant revenues for us and therefore we continue to focus on ensuring that we integrate whatever data and information that comes out of the various institutions to ensure that as a tax administration we efficiently mobilise domestic resources for the betterment of the fiscals. So I think having said that it becomes quite important that in a DRM context that the issues of hidden wealth becomes a discussion point here today and we've got four speakers that will interchangeably address some pertinent aspects of the issues that pertain to hidden wealth and without further ado, I will allow the first speaker to come forward. Anzila, if you can approach. Thank you very much and good morning to all of you. We had a very interesting morning today. It was a panel which raised some of the questions that you will be exploring in this session as well. It was a great warm-up and I look forward to our discussion through all these next hour and a half. So in my brief presentation, what I would like to do is to share some insights as to the work of the global forum on transparency and exchange of information. In the presentation I'll focus first on the progress which has been made in relation to two standards that the global forum is helping to implement. These are the exchange of information on request and automatic exchange of financial account information. So far we've been focusing a lot on what needs to be done and in my presentation I'll try to say what has already been done. Also, what are those exchanges in practice, the numbers surrounding the scope of exchanges? Then and in line was the topic of this gathering. We will talk a bit about the role of these two tools in domestic revenue mobilization and finally, of course, what's next? Because we certainly have not yet reached the end in this journey. So let me take you back to 2009. What happened then? It was the OECD members and also those jurisdictions which are referred to as non-cooperative tax havens all committed to implement exchange of information on request standard. At that point, the global forum was called upon to carry out peer reviews of exchange of information on request. As of today, we have 168 member jurisdictions and half of these jurisdictions, more than half in fact today, are developing countries. Developing countries, they make significant contribution to the work of the global forum. If you look at the composition of the subsidiary working bodies, developing countries would represent about one-third of the delegates. These contributions of various types and for instance, last year 40% of expert assessors in relation to exchange of information on request were delegated by developing countries. Half of the members of the expert panel on the assessment of confidentiality and data protection are also coming from developing countries. So, what progress have you made in that group of 168 jurisdictions? Let me first talk about exchange of information on request. That standard has already come through two rounds of reviews. The first round was completed in 2016 and for those of you not familiar with the substance of those reviews, they can include three components. The first component is to ensure that jurisdictions have information available to them and that information would be ownership information, information on accounting records and also banking information. You would already sense, especially those of you coming from tax administrations, that making sure that jurisdiction have access to that information is important not only for international exchanges, but also for domestic revenue collection purposes and that's an important element of development as such. The second component is to ensure that competent authorities will have access to that information domestically and the third component is really about the actual exchanges. So that's what we focused on in round one of the reviews. In 2016, the standard was enhanced to include also beneficial ownership information in it. So now we are looking into the availability of legal as well as beneficial ownership information and the second round that we use is largely focusing on revisiting what we looked at in round one plus beneficial ownership. Now we are almost halfway through these reviews in the second round with 101 jurisdictions being rated. So what do we know from those reviews is that 85% of jurisdictions that have so far been reviewed are compliant or largely compliant. Generally, you would say the standard demonstrates growing maturity. Whilst we are saying that the standard as a whole is quite well implemented globally currently, there are still weak areas. One of the weakest areas is one that relates to beneficial ownership information, the newest component that hasn't yet been reviewed twice. So you see it on the element A1. About half of the jurisdictions are non-compliant or partially compliant with the implementation of this particular requirement. Also, some material deficiencies can still be found in the availability of accounting records. That's A2 and the very last one, C5, that's about exchanges of information in practice. What do we do to make sure that things get better? We have an annual enhanced follow-up process in which jurisdictions report what they have done to implement recommendations provided to them and we also provide them with technical assistance, of course, to make sure that that happens. Another important component is that we monitor in real-time exchanges. So each year, all jurisdictions can report on the exchanges and if there is any difficulty in communication with another jurisdiction, you can make a complaint. So what about AUY, Automatic Exchange of Information, adopted as a second standard in 2014 and the Global Forum launched a commitment process. The initial focus was on ensuring a level playing field so that developed countries and also international financial centres swiftly implement that standard. That process covered about 100 jurisdictions which started exchanges in 2018. What about developing countries? Developing countries without financial centres were provided with more time, understanding that their capacity is more limited in terms of implementing the standard quickly. They may consider their own capacity guided by technical assistance team and define the date by which they will be implementing the standard. At the moment, 48 developing countries have already defined the date by which they will be implementing the standard. So that's a significant number, it's about 40% of all committed jurisdictions. 11 developing countries in addition are undergoing technical assistance on this method in order to define by which they will be implementing. So how do we assess the effectiveness of implementation? There are three main components to that process. First is the assessment of confidentiality and data safeguards framework. That's a very important assessment to demonstrate that you can handle data securely. If you receive the data, we don't want leaks, we don't want to scandal around data not being handled appropriately. Therefore, we check that capacity before exchanges commence and that's something that has been mentioned in the conference earlier today, which is a challenging component for developing countries and then also after exchanges have started. We also reviewed the legal frameworks which implement automatic exchange of information and finally we look into the effectiveness in practice. So what is the picture emerging from those analysis? Let me first tell you about the legal framework. So assessment of legal frameworks is pretty good. We have information published last year at the end of 2022. There are more than 100 jurisdictions were reviewed that over 90% of jurisdictions are either having that framework in place or in place, but need some improvement. It didn't happen overnight. 74 jurisdictions had to make changes in their legislation in order to get to this point and 600 recommendations were implemented in order for us to reach that result. Effectiveness in practice is the second component. We published the first results last year and you could see that a large majority of jurisdictions have already put in place administrative compliance frameworks in order to make sure that the standard is implemented correctly. However, there are still jurisdictions which don't have that in place and we are working on making sure that that changes. This year we had the stage of in-depth reviews which means that assessment teams are visiting each country that have commenced exchanges to verify on the ground where the financial institutions and their regulators indeed comply with the standard and with their claimed compliance agenda. So let me move after that to exchanges in practice because so far I've just explained to you how the legal framework operates and what we have in terms of commitment process. The network for exchange of information has expanded significantly since 2010. Back then main sources or main foundation on which exchanges took place was bilateral agreements. Since 2010 we use a multilateral treaty which means that for any developing countries that would like to receive information and a couple of those were already mentioned during those conference. All that's needed is to sign one convention and that opened the rest to information in 146 jurisdictions with one ratification which is a significant advantage. The quality of domestic frameworks and also a wider international framework mean that there are more exchanges now that they used to be 10 or more years ago. Approximately 25,000 requests have been made by the members of the global forum in 2022 and that's more than double from the number that we've seen in 2010. Automatic exchange of information, exchanges are massive. You can see the gradual increase through 2018 to 2022 on this slide but basically what we have today is in 2022, 123 million financial accounts were exchanged worldwide and the total assets of about 12 trillion. You will ask me a question what about developing countries, right? Because we hear a lot and hear specifically the developing countries are behind. I already told you that 40% of those committed to implement by the defined data are developing countries but what do they receive in practice? Quite significant. What we do know is that the developing countries are net receivers of AUI data. In 2022 they received over 33 million financial accounts and send information on over 16 million accounts. The difference is quite even more striking when we look at the values. About half a trillion were reported to other countries by developing countries and yet they received information about the values of over 3 trillion. So what we can say was certainly that if you invest in AUI, in implementation of AUI, you definitely will receive significant information back. What about the quality of that data? We conduct survey every year which demonstrates to us whether countries are happy with the quality of the data and we do see that the matching rates are quite high and they are increasing over time. And if there were any obstacles that countries identify through the survey, these were the human resources or capacity to analyze the data in which we put now significant capacity building support in order to make sure that the data can be used. So what about revenue potential? I think these numbers have been cited and been in media quite widely. 126 billion euro have been identified by jurisdictions around the world through short tax investigations, voluntary disclosure and other associated tax transparency initiatives. 41 billion was identified by developing countries and these are not some estimates. These are actual revenues that are reported by our members through the survey. We also asked jurisdictions whether they monitor how much revenue is being identified through these two standards. Only 40% monitor the revenues. So that figure is significant understatement because only 40% would even have records of how much is being identified. Can developing countries benefit more from these standards? Yes. And what we do for that is we adopt the processes both at the commitment and implementation level and also we provide capacity building assistance. I will not be explaining in detail how the processes are adapted but I wanted to focus on one specific example because it was mentioned earlier today during the panel. It was ISM, information security management. I think there was question from Uganda as to whether the standards could be different for developing countries. So the solution that we found is that the same standards apply to everybody but then there are some solutions at the level of implementation. So specifically on ISM, we have published guidance on the implementation of a secure parameter for AUI purposes. And that allows developing countries to have a secure space, physical or virtual, in which they meet those requirements on confidentiality and data protection. And that is the balance to be found between making sure that developing countries can receive AUI data and that would be both financial accounts and also CBCR. But yet the data is secure. So speaking about not the organization as a whole, meeting that higher security standard but creating an environment where those standards are being respected, which we believe allows developing countries to meet those requirements faster. And I will not be speaking much about capacity building but just like at a very high level, so you had this sense, 60 developing countries already benefited from technical assistance support this year and received over 90 reports that we published tailored to every specific jurisdiction's context. We have very interesting regional initiative programs and I'm mentioning this because not only they allow countries in the region to make progress and monitor it but also to define their own objectives and set the agenda for international cooperation. For instance, Latin America initiative piloted a very interesting program on how can we use tax information exchange on the tax treaties for other purposes because at the moment you can only use that information for tax purposes but you can definitely see benefits for IML purposes or something else. At the moment that type of use is very restricted. So on the Latin America initiative we piloted a program which allows doing so and we developed possible approaches for doing that and the report on this was published earlier this summer to G20 in order to demonstrate how globally we can benefit for this type of exchanges which could be extra benefit for development. African initiative allowed looking more closely into recovery of taxes and if you publish a toolkit for jurisdictions that would like to enhance cooperation in the area of recovery of taxes and you see here how developing countries in particular can promote their interest and set their own agenda and then push it to a global level in fact. We also have trainings and toolkits which are focusing on developing resources in developing countries themselves. So training the trainers which will then train others locally. So what's next in the last minute or two that is remaining first last year we received a call from G20 in order to build upon our commitment and monitoring processes in order to achieve widespread implementation of crypto assets. We also have an asset reporting framework and the amendments to the common reporting standard by relevant jurisdictions. When the OECD completed the technical work on the package of the framework itself in July 2023 we received another call from G20 to define a timeline as to when those exchanges can be commenced noting that significant number of the jurisdictions already want to start those exchanges in 2027. So the work in this area as I have commenced we literally a few weeks ago published a call for membership in the new CARF group and as soon as that group is formed the work in this area will start. Let me conclude with the current priorities to wrap it up. So the first would be of course continuing AUIR and AUY peer reviews and monitoring. We still have about 70 jurisdictions that are to be reviewed on AUIR. We have a huge number of developing countries which are starting to implement AUY so it's a significant amount of work ahead. We are also working on redesigning the peer review and monitoring processes and you will hear more about it in just a few months. As we witness growing maturity of the standard we want to adopt our processes. We are also incorporating monitoring of current and emerging risks to the standard in the processes. Obviously CARF already mentioned those new areas pushed by developing countries themselves such as wider use of information or recovery of taxes is an important new component of work and finally capacity building. Which will continue to expand. That would be all and if you have any specific questions we will be happy to address it later. Thank you.