Marcina Hunter
speaker
18 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 19 Jul
Marcina Hunter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Illicit gold mining really is a global phenomenon.
We see it across Latin America, across Africa, across Asia.
I would say so.
We can't really quantify the scale in numerical values.
I think what we can say is that the market is immense in the billions of dollars and it is having severe environmental impacts and undermines governance and security.
Illegal mining itself
It contains a really wide range of actors.
So it can be everything from miners mining without a license to organized crime groups.
We certainly are seeing drug cartels moving into the gold sector.
Colombian law enforcement in particular has said that the gold sector is now more profitable than the cocaine sector for these organized crime groups.
But it also extends to state-embedded actors, so government authorities or politically exposed persons.
as well as the private sector.
The system itself is being compromised and captured by political actors who might be engaging in land grabbing, predatory tactics to capture mining operations.
And also foreign financing plays a really big role.
One of the key actors flagged is central banks who have very little oversight on their gold trades.
So if we look at those supply chains, there is still a lot of flows going to the Middle East, in particular Dubai, where it's then mixed into or laundered into global gold markets.
And then it can go to Switzerland or the U.K.,
or other financial markets with a degree of opacity hiding its illicit origins.
Showing 1–18 of 18