Charmian Gooch

Gooch met her colleagues and future Global Witness co-founders Simon Taylor and Patrick Alley while they were working together at the Environmental Investigation Agency.[4] Concerns over the funding of covert warfare through illegal trade had increased at the time.[5] After discussing the need for a campaign group that could address these and related environmental and human rights issues, the trio decided to take action.[4]

Gooch co-founded Global Witness in 1993 with Taylor and Alley to expose the "nexus of corruption, natural resources, and conflict".[2][4][5] They created Global Witness due to the "looting of entire countries," which they saw as a human rights issue.[2]

At its inception, Gooch and her co-founders solicited donations at London Underground station entrances due to a lack of funding sources. Eventually, a Dutch charity known as Oxfam Novib provided the trio with enough money to start their first major campaign on the Cambodia-Thailand frontier. This also became a starting point for them to "build their activism on facts they collected themselves in the field."[2]

In January and February 1995, Gooch and Global Witness undertook an investigation regarding the illegal trade of timber in both Thailand and Cambodia, which was largely responsible for funding the civil war in Cambodia.[9] Posing as timber buyers, Gooch and her team visited logging camps to study how a Cambodian communist insurgency known as the Khmer Rouge was "collaborating with Thai interests to cut down hardwood forests in violation of a United Nations ban."[2]

One night, while undercover at a Khmer Rouge checkpoint with her colleague Patrick Alley, a local guard stopped Gooch and her co-worker while they were travelling in a car. The guard was intoxicated and proceeded to lean into the car with an AK-47 before the pair decided to tell the driver to "Go! Go!"[2]

The evidence Gooch and Global Witness managed to obtain was compiled into a report called Forest, Famine, and War – The Key to Cambodia's Future,[10] which was published in March 1995. Subsequently, the report received widespread press coverage around the world and was widely distributed among delegates of donor countries to Cambodia, as well as various non-governmental organisations and multi-lateral donor agencies.[9] The international pressure that followed as a result of the report forced Cambodia to introduce a timber export ban in May 1995 that significantly reduced Thai trading with the Khmer Rouge and effectively closed the Cambodian border to further Thai timber imports.[2][9][11]

The Khmer Rouge and their leader were deprived of an annual revenue close to $90 million.[7] In the 13 months that followed, the Khmer Rouge located near the Cambodia-Thailand border eventually defected to the government, as Global Witness had effectively "cut off their income."[7]

In the late 1990s, the sale of diamonds to fund wars in countries such as Angola, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sierra Leone had resulted in the death and displacement of millions of people.[12]

In 1997, Gooch travelled to Angola to investigate how militants were mining diamonds to prolong a civil war that had started in the 1970s. She shoved a would-be-mugger down a flight of stairs while gathering information about the diamond supply chain from government officials and businessmen in the Angolan capital of Luanda and in the diamond-trading centre of Antwerp, Belgium, earning her a reputation for toughness.[2]

With her Global Witness co-founders Taylor and Alley, Gooch proceeded to travel to Lisbon to interview members of an Angolan anti-communist group called the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola. Also known as UNITA, Gooch and her colleagues probed into questions regarding mining operations in Angola.[2]

Gooch and Global Witness compiled all of the evidence they had collected into a report entitled "A Rough Trade," which was published and released in 1998.[13] Exposing the role of diamonds in funding the civil war in Angola, the report also revealed the secretive practices of the global diamond industry for the first time.[12] It illustrated how over a six-year period, UNITA was able to purchase arms by generating $3.7 billion from the sale of diamonds. This prompted governments and other entities in the diamond industry to take action to remove "conflict diamonds" from the global marketplace.[2][12]

Gooch's efforts helped Global Witness become the first organisation to bring the world's attention to the issue of conflict diamonds.[12] As a result of their findings, a government-led certification scheme known as the Kimberley Process was set up in 2003 in an effort to reduce the trade of conflict diamonds.[14] It requires member states to "set up an import and export control system" in which rough diamonds are tracked from the mines to the jewellers.[7][14]

Gooch's work with Global Witness in exposing the conflict diamond trade was the inspiration for the 2006 film Blood Diamond. The film highlights some of the key events that Global Witness was a part of, such as the 1998 report and the creation of the Kimberley Process.[3]

In most corruption cases that Global Witness has pursued, Gooch and her colleagues have found one aspect that is very common. They discovered that most perpetrators stored their money in "daisy chains of untraceable shell companies," which are corporate entities that are minuscule in size and located in offshore havens such as the British Virgin Islands.[2] This was creating a financial system that made it simple to "hide and move suspect funds around the world" while impacting "hundreds of millions of people in countries all over the world."[2][15]

To address this challenge, in 2010 Gooch and Global Witness began work with a coalition of non-governmental organisations committed to forcing companies to identify "their ultimate, or beneficial, owners."[2] The coalition has engaged in lobbying of policymakers in Washington, London, and Brussels, calling for "governments to create public registries of the real owners of companies and trusts so that law enforcement, businesses, NGOs, and ordinary citizens know who they're dealing with."[15]

Efforts by Gooch and her allies aimed at encouraging members of the G8 to be more transparent were successful when the US Congress passed a piece of legislation in July 2010 known as the Dodd – Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which was designed to decrease various risks in the US financial system.[2][16]

In 2013, Gooch's movement progressed further when the UK government made the issue of anonymous companies the central focus of its G8 presidency and committed to "ending anonymous companies by publishing information on the ultimate, beneficial owners of British companies."[15] On 31 October, UK Prime Minister at the time David Cameron attended the Open Government Partnership conference in London and took to the stage to announce that he was going to "introduce legislation requiring all companies based in Britain to disclose who their ultimate owners are in a publicly accessible registry."[2]

In 2014, Gooch's lobbying for eliminating anonymous companies resulted in two key committees of the European Parliament voting to do the same. The European Union agreed to create public registries detailing who owns and controls companies and trusts registered in the EU.[17]

Her work also led to the creation of a report called "The Great Rip Off," published in September of the same year and aimed at illustrating how anonymous company owners in the US are a "threat to American interests."[18] As a result of the report, Gooch garnered support for her campaign from law enforcement officials and business leaders worldwide.[15]

In 2001, Gooch and Global Witness investigated a logging deal between the Zimbabwean Forestry Commission and the DRC government. Their work revealed that the deal had ties to the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front and would result in the destruction of a forest area comparable to the size of the UK[19] As a result of their investigation, the deal was immediately halted.[19]

In 2003, they worked with the LA Times to reveal that Riggs Bank in Washington, DC held millions of dollars worth of oil revenues for Equatorial Guinea's president Teodoro Obiang. The subsequent investigation performed by a Senate committee found the bank was indeed engaging in money-laundering, resulting in a fine of $25 million as well as the eventual selling off of the company "at a fraction of its value."[19]

In 2005, Gooch and Global Witness discovered that China had been importing up to "1.3 million cubic meters of timber from Burma per year and that around 98% of this trade was illegal."[19] The evidence published in the consequent Global Witness report generated an international outcry that prompted the Chinese government to "close its land border to timber from Burma in early 2006."[19]