 Your Excellency Minister Desmond Lee, Minister of the Prime Minister's Office, and Second Minister for Home Affairs and National Development Singapore. Your Excellency Honorable Fikele Balouda, Minister of Police South Africa. Excellencies Mr. Meng Hong Wei, Interpol President, Interpol Executive Committee Members, Chief of Police and heads of Interpol National Central Bureau, partners from the private sector, ladies and gentlemen, a very good evening. This my great privilege to welcome you back to Interpol World and to once again experience the hospitality of the government, the city and the people of Singapore in what will be another outstanding global event. Throughout history, islands were often taken as simple isolation. Singapore provided and proved us all wrong. We stand today in a global travel, financial and talent hub, one that made cross-border connectivity and innovation both a vision and a daily reality. Ladies and gentlemen, today's generation lives at the heart of a global competitive market. While this opens to endless opportunities for young businessmen and women stepping forward in life with hope and talent, it also shapes an operational landscape for law enforcement and governments worldwide that has never been more challenging. Interpol anticipated those challenges almost a decade ago, leading to the establishment of its global complex for innovation ITCI here in Singapore so that foresight and research could become new assets in the service of law enforcement in the field. The trust that the Singaporean government has placed in Interpol by providing the organization with a premises for ITCI as well as supporting our operational and project-oriented activities demonstrates a partnership that is beyond usual. Your Excellency Mr Desmond Lee, thank you very much for having us here today, for hosting ITCI and for your continued support to Interpol's mandate and vision. When I assumed office in 2014 my vision statement was to further reinforce the spirit of modernizing international policing methods to better adapt to the challenges of tomorrow. This perspective has brought once again two worlds together here today, industry and law enforcement. Over the course of the next few days, experts and practitioners from both worlds will analyze the threats we all share and showcase how state-of-the-art technologies can be harnessed to bring tangible solution to the field and shape the future of security. Ladies and gentlemen, we are witnessing technological and geopolitical uncertainties leading to a complex international security environment. Opportunities are thriving for those who do not seek progress but harm and for those who do not want economies to thrive but to become victims of organized crime. If we look at virtual space it has become the most revolutionary invention to impact the contemporary world. It has unexpectedly shortened geographical distances, breaking barriers between people, eliminating national borders and destroying all previously conceived barriers to communication. This however has led to a largely ungoverned space for crime election which is becoming increasingly difficult to penetrate by law enforcement and other security actors. Mobile connectivity and the Internet of Things have shattered the barrier between physical and cyber space. Simply walking on a sidewalk, each of us is consuming and producing more megabytes in data than the number of steps we take. Criminal opportunities are endless. Cyber criminals can now attack from anywhere in the globe, any target destination, putting at risk governments, businesses and consumers and creating path for cyber extortion, ransomware and actual physical security threats. Child abusers can pursue and abuse young victims all over the world within a clique. Social media has been playing a pivotal role in the recruitment and radicalization of vulnerable youth and encrypted applications are the channel of choice to coordinate terrorist action. Connected unmanned vehicles have already been turned into weapons in conflict zones. Responding effectively to these challenges requires constantly adapting investigative procedures, ensuring that investigators have the right skills for this environment. Staying ahead of trends as well as time accessing information outside the police ward and preserving evidence wherever that might be hidden or hosted. I still remember the days when I was a young police officer. Learning to lift prints from the snow seemed complicated. At that time the police world is a different world nowadays. Today the bank robber is no longer the thief who walks into a bank with a weapon to steal whatever amount is with a cashier. Today the bank robber is part of a multinational chain of hackers. Runners and cash outcrews stealing millions of dollars from multiple ATMs in multiple nations within a few hours. Law enforcement is now required to think outside the box. We can no longer work in isolation. Building bridges to other worlds has become a modern necessity, which Interpol has recognized as such. Police must have the capacity to stretch out of its comfort zone. Interpol was created with this goal in mind almost a century ago. The organization's neutrality was designed to allow even countries unable to have diplomatic relationship to cooperate at law enforcement level. Once again we were built to break different worlds together for global security. That same spirit lives today in our role as a gateway between police and industry. A mandate endorsed by the World Economic Forum in its recommendation for public-private partnership against cyber crime adopted last year in Davos in Switzerland. Just like our entire history, our relationship with the private sector was spawned and evolved out of sheer operational imperatives. The first was to rely on the industry as a solution to access expertise, technology and other resources that are not readily available in the public sector, but urgently demanded. This is the case of technologies in the areas of ballistics, biometric, identification and cybersecurity, among many others. Benefits for the business community include access to a global network of key stakeholders in law enforcement and greater visibility of their contribution towards a safer world. We have seen this in the area of child exploitation. Interpol partnered up with Microsoft to integrate photo DNA technology into our international child sexual sexual exploitation database, the X-Database. Secondly, the industry may unwillingly play the role of a key criminal chain node. In many cases the private industry will manage platforms that are often abused by criminal groups. This is the case, for example, in the area of online pharmaceutical crimes. Last year, Interpol coordinated the largest ever operation which targeted the online sales of medicines and medical devices, Operation Pangea 10. Interpol gathered private partners from the internet and payment industries and supported the operation which saw millions of illicit and counterfeit medicines being seized. Thirdly, in the police world, the industry can be perceived as a sensor able to extend the security perimeter provided by state structures. An example is in the area of works of art and cultural heritage. Interpol giving access to its stolen and lost works of art database to all art private market stakeholders since 2009, so for instance museums and auction houses, to facilitate the detection of stolen and lost cultural heritage items likely to surface into the art market. This means that for instance when cultural heritage is destroyed by ISIL in Syria or Iraq and items are sold on the black market, the decisive action is to recover that object will be enabled by a private entity which will recognize it within its stock thanks to police formation available through Interpol. A similar approach is applied to the automotive sector and stolen motor vehicles. Interpol through project index has brought together member countries, international organizations and private entities to share vital information, expertise and best practices on preventing vehicle theft. Recovering stolen vehicles and ensuring stolen vehicles are not used in other crimes. Once again the industry can protect itself from criminal commodities penetrating its business while acting as an advanced sensor for law enforcement. And finally the industry can be seen as a full operational partner. In many instances the industry and data collected by it has been an integral part of operations coordinated by Interpol. An example can be seen at the beginning of this year when Interpol led operation targeting cyber crime across the Asian region resulted in the identification of nearly 9,000 command and control servers and hundreds of compromised websites including some of governments. The Interpol Global Complex for Innovation worked with Transmigral, Kaspersky Lab, Japan's Cyber Defense Institute which is part of the LEC consortium, USL Hamilton, British Telecom, Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks to develop actionable information packages. Information provided by the private sector combined with cyber issues flagged by the participating countries enabled Interpol produce and analyze cyber activity reports which identified multiple websites infected with a malware code which exploited the vulnerability of several governments. This shows Interpol's added value in this highly specialized crime field as a neutral platform bringing together not only private and public sectors but also countries that may even be on the opposite side of ongoing diplomatic roles. However no matter how closely we seek to work together challenges between the public and private sector will still remain. Firstly simply because criminals move as quickly as innovation and technology and often much faster than law enforcement's response. Secondly, member countries are still seeking to harmonize the international legal responses to the exchange of information across sectors and jurisdictions which still remains a complicated exercise in the hands of the law enforcement community. Many member countries continue to rely on traditional means of formal international cooperation in solving cyber crimes which in practice cannot be adapted to an everyday evolving and very specialized crime. In addition, while partnership with the private sector is critical to prevent sophisticated cross-border crimes, both parties still see obstacles to mutual trust. The protection of the industry's clients' privacy, a perceived lack of reciprocity in data sharing and often cumbersome process to access information from the private sector which may result a daunting task for most law enforcement agencies are cases in point. Your excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, interpose approach to these challenges is simply put to embrace them. We must analyze them, address them and turn them into the next generation of security solutions for our respective governments, markets and citizens. This is the vision behind Interpol World and it is a vision that requires all of you to be turned into reality. I also hope that this conference will generate pivotal recommendations that will further shape the way in which the private industry can work with law enforcement in making the world safer. I wish you all a successful conference and thank you very much for your attention. Thank you, Mr. Stork.