DATACROS II Kick-off Meeting

Today, on Wednesday February 23rd, was the day of the Kick-off meeting of project DATACROS II – Empowering a Tool to Assess Corruption Risk factors in firms’ Ownership Structure (ISF Police 2017-AG-CORRUPT-101038736), co-funded by the European Commission – DG Home Affairs and coordinated by Transcrime.

This represents the second phase of project DATACROS (2019-2021), in which Transcrime has developed a prototype of an IT tool based on artificial intelligence, able to provide support to investigation, intelligence, monitoring, and risk assessment activities carried out by public authorities in the field of anti-corruption and in the prevention of financial and corporate crimes. During these two years, the tool has already been tested by national and international networks of law enforcement agencies, anti-corruption authorities and other public authorities. In the tests conducted, the tool has already demonstrated a very strong predictive capacity, for example being able to correctly identify up to 83% of companies linked to people subject to sanctions or with criminal records.

In the second phase of the project, the application will be strengthened and improved thanks to the support and suggestions of 18 public authorities partners of the project – including Europol, ANAC, French and Romanian anti-corruption authorities, LEAs from France, Belgium, Spain and Romania, and the French anti-trust authority. In particular, the risk scoring and screening functions will be extended and new data sources (with global coverage) and new anomaly indicators for risk assessment will be included.

The project will also provide the opportunity to create a network for sharing and exchanging information between these institutions, which have one particularly relevant element in common: the identification and monitoring of companies potentially linked to illegal phenomena. During the project, the organization of periodic meetings and workshops will stimulate discussions on these issues, facilitating the exchange of good investigative practices, intelligence techniques, new patterns and anomaly indicators. In particular, the network will also include partners in the field of investigative journalism, including OCCRP (global level), IRPI (Italian level) and RISE PROJECT (Romania). Thanks to this, DATACROS II constitutes an unprecedented large-scale collaborative initiative between public authorities and civil society actors for the prevention of financial crime.

The kick off meeting was held virtually, to guarantee all 18 partners the opportunity to participate safely and to be actively involved in the discussion. During the meeting all partners were able to present to the consortium their role and expectations on the project, starting to organize the following activities.

During the next months we will continue to update you on the news about the project and on the results that the consortium will achieve. In the meantime, you can find more information on what has already been realized on the DATACROS I website.

List of project Partners:

LEAs/AROs:

ANABI – Agentia Nationala de Administrare a Bunurilor Indisponibilizate, Romania
CNP – Cuerpo Nacional de Policía, Spain
BFP – Police Federale Belge, Belgium
DCPJ – Direction Centrale de la Police Judiciaire, France

Anti-Corruption Agencies:

AFA – Agence française anticorruption, France
ANAC – Autorità nazionale anticorruzione, Italy
OPLC – Prevention and Fight against Corruption Office of the Balearic Islands, Spain
ANI – Agenția Națională De Integritate, Romania
DNA – National Anti-Corruption Directorate, Romania

Competition Authorities:

ADLC – Autorité de la Concurrence, France
CCRL – Competition Council of the Republic of Lithuania, Lithuania
UOHS – Urad pro Ochranu Hospodarske Souteze, Czech Republic

Civil society and Investigative journalists:

IRPI – Investigative Reporting Project Italy, Italy
RISE – Asociatia Rise Project, Romania

International Networks:

Europol
NCPA – Network of Corruption Prevention Authorities
OCCRP – Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project