From Oscar-winning director, Danis Tanovic (No Man’s Land), comes a true story 12 years in the making. A Pakistani salesman, employed by Nestle, one of the world’s largest corporations, learns that his promotion of baby formula to doctors is causing babies to die. He risks everything to make it stop, taking on the industry with the help of Cambridge-based Baby Milk Action IBFAN UK.

A BBC Films/UK Film Council version of the film was halted weeks before production: with defamation laws operating as ‘guilty until proven innocent’ the huge potential costs of defending a true story in court meant that a transnational company could prevent a true story being told simply by virtue of its deep pockets. A few years later Indian producers Prashita Chaudhary and Guneet Monga finally made the film possible.

With a breakthrough performance from Bollywood favourite Emraan Hashmi and a cast including Danny Huston, Geetanjali Thapa, Khalid Abdalla, Maryam d’Abo and Satyadeep Misra, Tigers was shot in the Indian Punjab and London. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and in Official Competition at San Sebastian.

Running time: 90 minutes

Chair

Henry Porter is a novelist and former commentator for the Observer. He is a winner of the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger award –  for Brandenburg, his novel about  the Fall of the Berlin wall,  which he covered in 1989. His latest book, Firefly, is the story of young boy on the migrant route in 2015 and is the first part of a trilogy set in the turbulent world of US and European politics.

Speakers 

Syed Aamir Raza joined Nestlé Milkpak as a Medical Delegate in December 1994 at the age of 24. It was a dream come true to work for a multinational company and he was quickly indoctrinated with Nestlé’s “Be the Best” slogan. Aamir was responsible for promoting breastmilk substitutes and infant cereals. One of his first tasks was to run a baby show, already organised by the Area Detailing Executive. Baby shows were popular with health workers and mothers and provided an opportunity for marketing staff to make direct contact with both and to display the company’s range of breastmilk substitutes and discuss them. Such activities are banned by Article 5.5 of the International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes and Nestlé’s own “Charter”. After the events that are depicted in Tigers,  Aamir came to the UK for 5 months, and then to Canada where he was granted leave to stay on humanitarian on compassionate grounds. He eventually gained permanent residence. It was 7 years before he was able to be reunited with Shafqat, his wife and his two children,  and in that time both his parents died. He now drives a Taxi in Toronto.

Patti Rundall has worked for over 30 years with Baby Milk Action and is the UK member of the global network IBFAN, campaigning for effective regulations on the marketing, safety and labelling of foods for infants and young children. She is a founder of the Conflict of Interest Coalition and a coordinator of the international Nestle Boycott. 

Andy Paterson’s productions include Gore, Tigers, The Railway Man and Girl With A Pearl Earring. Previous productions include the Oscar and BAFTA-nominated Hilary and Jackie, starring Emily Watson and Rachel Griffiths, and the Oscar-winning Restoration, starring Robert Downey Jr, Hugh Grant and Meg Ryan. Forthcoming productions include The Plutonium Club, a Cold War thriller set against the development of the British atomic bomb from a screenplay by Paterson and Hetreed.

Cat Villiers and her company Autonomous, have produced, executive produced and co-produced many films around the world. With a career that has has also encompassed journalism, philanthropy and activism, her first feature film Before The Rain won the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion, an Independent Spirit Award, and an Academy Award Nomination. Cat is a Trustee, with directors Mike Leigh and Simon Mcburney of the Katrin Cartlidge Foundation, a UK charitable trust that supports new directorial talent and other cultural initiatives from around the world.

In 2014, Ukraine was in the depths of a health crisis, with infectious diseases and disastrous levels of cardiovascular conditions contributing to low life expectancy and general misery. Officials and their allies in the pharmaceutical industry were embezzling much of the state medical budget, leaving scant resources for doctors’ salaries, medicines or vital equipment.

What has followed has been one of the most successful hands-on anti-corruption interventions in history. Three international bodies took over procurement, and succeeded in cutting prices by 40 percent. Hosted as usual by investigative journalist Oliver Bullough, the first kleptoscope of 2019 looks at how this happened, what obstacles it faced, and whether it could be a blueprint for cleaning up corrupt administrations in other countries.

Speakers

Henry Marsh is a brain surgeon, and an award-winning author, whose 2014 memoir Do No Harm was a bestseller. His work in Ukraine was the subject of a BBC documentary The English Surgeon in 2007.

Tania Korotchenko is in charge of Crown Agents’ procurement work in Ukraine, and has worked with the health ministry to significantly reduce the prices it pays for key medications.

Fergus Drake is Chief Executive at Crown Agents, a not-for-profit international development company. He has over two decades of experience delivering humanitarian and development programmes around the world. Previously, Fergus was Executive Director of Global Programmes at Save the Children, has experience at HM Treasury in the UK and embedded in the Government of Rwanda with Tony Blair’s Africa Governance Initiative.

  Watch the video stream of Kleptoscope 11

A story by Carlo Bonini and Giuliano Foschini. Written by Diana Ligorio and Emilio Fabio Torsello.

Trailer: http://www.h24.it/video/DAPHNE_TRAILER90_HD.mp4

Run Time: 49 mins

Chair

Rebecca Vincent is the UK Bureau Director for Reporters Without Borders, known internationally as Reporters sans frontières (RSF), which works to promote and defend press freedom around the world. She is a human rights activist, writer, and former US diplomat. She has worked with a wide range of human rights and freedom of expression NGOs, and has published widely on human rights issues. Rebecca has campaigned consistently for justice for Daphne Caruana Galizia, and on the broader issue of safety of journalists.

Speakers

Caroline Muscat is co-founder and editor of Shift News She exposed the Gaffarena scandal in 2015, which led to the resignation of then Parliamentary Secretary Michael Falzon and resulted in an investigation by the Auditor General.  Caroline is the former News Editor of The Times and The Sunday Times, while maintaining her focus on investigative journalism exposing scandals such as the one on the ITS site in St George’s Bay involving the Seabank Group in 2016.

Carlo Bonini  is a senior investigative reporter and special correspondent for the Italian daily “la Repubblica”. His career in journalism started in Rome, the city where he was born, when he was in his early twenties, in 1990 as city reporter for the daily “il manifesto”. Since then, he was in New York, at “Newsweek international”, and in Milan, where he worked for “il Corriere della Sera” daily between 1997 and 2000, when he finally joined “la Repubblica” in Rome. In a 30 year long career, he won several Journalistic prizes and published 8 non fiction books. From one of them, “Suburra”, on the Roman Mafia, was the successful Netflix tv series and the homonym movie directed by acclaimed director Stefano Sollima. Carlo Bonini is part for “la Repubblica” of the “Daphne Project”, the investigative consortium of 18 international media outlets led by the French “Forbidden Stories” that had been investigating the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia.

Speakers

Khadija Ismayilova is an award-winning investigative journalist who will be joining us by video link from Azerbaijan to discuss her stories, and the government’s response to them. She has been repeatedly jailed, harassed and defamed, but has continued to expose the financial dealings of her country’s ruling family.

Rebecca Vincent is the UK Bureau Director for Reporters Without Borders, known internationally as Reporters Sans Frontières. She is a human rights activist, writer, and former US diplomat. She has worked with a wide range of international and Azerbaijani NGOs, and has published widely on human rights issues.

Baroness Helena Kennedy QC is a legendary barrister, who was worked for dozens of campaigns over the decades. Last year, she introduced the Sergei Magnitsky amendments in the House of Lords, which seek to restrict visas to those credibly accused of gross human rights abuses.

The Serious Fraud Office has had a big year. In January, its investigation into corruption at Rolls-Royce – which lasted four years, involving 30 million documents — led to a landmark deferred prosecution agreement and the largest fine ever imposed on a UK company for criminal conduct. In March, it reached another substantial DPA, with Tesco Stores Ltd, and in June it charged Barclays and some of its former senior executives with fraud offences. It has probes ongoing into Airbus, Rio Tinto, and other household names.

The fines add up. Since April 2014, the SFO has cost the taxpayer £216 million, but earned the Treasury £676 million – a return of £1million for every employee.

Then came the general election, at which the Conservative Party’s manifesto promised to “incorporate” the SFO into the National Crime Agency – widely taken to involve stripping the SFO of its independence. Although that promise did not make it into the Queen’s Speech, thanks to Theresa May failing to win a majority, the future of the SFO is not resolved. This is therefore a time of both success, and uncertainty.

At the Frontline Club’s seventh kleptoscope, hosted as usual by journalist Oliver Bullough, SFO director David Green will talk about how the SFO works, and what might lie ahead for the investigation of fraud and corruption in the UK post-Brexit. He will be joined by Camilla de Silva, who led a key strand of the SFO’s investigation into Rolls-Royce and was recently rewarded with the Bar Council’s Award of Employed Barrister of the Year, for what promises to be a fascinating evening even by kleptoscope’s standards.

We see mafias as vast, powerful organisations, harvesting billions of dollars across the globe and wrapping their tentacles around everything from governance to finance. But is this the truth? Travelling from mafia initiation ceremonies in far-flung Russian cities to elite gambling clubs in downtown Macau, Federico Varese sets off in search of answers. Using wiretapped conversations, interviews and previously unpublished police records, he builds up a picture of the real men and women caught up in mafia life, showing their loves and fears, ambitions and disappointments, as well as their crimes.

Mafia Life takes us into the real world of organised crime, where henchmen worry about their bad managers and have high blood pressure, assassinations are bungled as often as they come off, and increasing pressure from law enforcement means that a life of crime is no longer lived in the lap of luxury. As our world changes, so must mafias. Globalisation, migration and technology are disrupting traditions and threatening their revenue streams, and the Mafiosi must evolve or die. Mafia Life is an intense and totally compelling look at these organisations and the daily life of their members, as they get to grips with the modern world.

Kleptoscope 5 looks at this under-acknowledged economic catastrophe, and asks why it is so hard to recover assets stolen by kleptocrats. And what role does London play as both a safe haven for looted money, and a laundering centre for money being invested elsewhere?

As usual, the evening is hosted by investigative journalist Oliver Bullough, who will introduce a panel of hugely experienced and knowledgeable practitioners from the three spheres of asset recovery: law enforcement, private practice and civil society.

William Bourdon is a French lawyer who specialises in corporate, media and criminal law. In 2001, he founded Sherpa to “defend the victims of crimes committed by economic operators”, and has sought to bring cases against kleptocratic rulers of countries with assets in France: including Senegal, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Congo-Brazzaville. He recently created PPLAAF, a platform to protect whistle blowers in Africa (https://pplaaf.org).

Daniel Hall is a director at Burford Capital, a firm that specialises in funding asset recovery cases. He has spent more than a decade investigating fraud and financial crime, with a particular emphasis on sovereign cases.

David O’Mahony  is a barrister at 7BR and specialises in offshore issues. He has been instructed in cases involving money laundering and criminal fraud, civil and commercial law, arbitration, domestic and international financial regulation and international crime. He advises on public and private international law and international criminal law and has deep knowledge of the law of bribery and corruption.

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The film introduces us to two defectors  – 26 year old Eunhee Park and 25-year old Suuyeoung Lee, who is about to make her first appearance on the show. Both escaped with the help of smugglers who charged about 7,000 US dollars to take the women on a terrifying journey across the border into China and eventually to Thailand, from where they could reach South Korea.  The Chinese authorities arrest defectors and send them back, where they can face execution.

These women’s intimate stories paint a picture of a country where communism is being supplemented by a North Korean version of capitalism, with entrepreneurs making money by selling goods from China on the black market.  As many men work for the government, black market enterprises are run by women – which perhaps explains why over 70 per cent of those with the money and contacts needed to escape from the North are women.

Reporter: Seyi Rhodes

Producer/Director: Kate Hardie-Buckley

Series Editors: Monica Garnsey & Hugo Ward

A Quicksilver Media production

Speakers:

Chaired by series producer Hugo Ward

Kate Hardie-Buckley is a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker.

Paul French is an author and widely published analyst and commentator on Asia, Asian politics and current affairs. He is author of North Korea: State of Paranoia and the international and bestseller Midnight in Peking.

John Everard is former British Ambassador to North Korea and author of Only Beautiful, Please: A British Diplomat in North Korea

Kleptoscope returns with an evening focussed on Nigeria, a country criticised by former Prime Minister David Cameron as “fantastically corrupt”. Our panel of experts will address the roots of Nigerian corruption, ask why so much of the stolen money ends up in London, and discuss why more isn’t being done to give it back.

Host:

Oliver Bullough is an award-winning journalist and the author of two books about Russian history and politics, The Last Man in Russia and Let Our Fame be Great. He is also an expert guide for the Kleptocracy Tours initiative, which exposes money laundering via property in London.

Speakers:

Chibundu Onuzo is a Nigerian novelist, whose recently-published book Welcome to Lagos is a blackly-comic exploration of corrupt officials, scam artists, idealistic liberals and more in the greatest city in Africa. The Guardian praised its “Nollywood-like storylines and clever turns in plot”, while The Economist loved the way that the words of the “rich and poor, urban and rural, privileged and powerless, Muslim and Christian, Igbo and Yoruba collide to spectacular effect”.

Eva Anderson is a Senior Legal Research Officer at Transparency International’s Defence & Security Team. She has previously worked at Goldman Sachs, the Financial Services Authority, and as a forensic investigator at PriceWaterhouseCoopers. She is a qualified barrister, and an expert in the difficulties faced in attempting to recover the proceeds of corruption that have been stashed in the West.

Matthew Page was, until recently, the US intelligence community’s top Nigeria expert, advising the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and more. His book Nigeria: what everyone needs to know will be published later this year by Oxford University Press.