Yara Esquivel

Senior Financial Sector Specialist at World Bank

Speaker

Yara Esquivel is a Senior Financial Sector Specialist working at the World Bank’s Financial Markets Integrity unit. She is an attorney with twenty years of experience in the investigation of fraud and corruption. She has a master’s degree in International Human Rights Law from Oxford University. She was an anti-corruption prosecutor in her native Costa Rica, where she investigated a former head of State. Ms. Esquivel has been a fraud and corruption investigator for the United Nations in Africa and the World Bank in Latin America. She has been with the World Bank for over ten years, and currently works with the Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative (StAR), a partnership between the World Bank and the United Nation’s Office on Drug and Crime, providing technical assistance and policy advice on the recovery of proceeds of corruption. Ms. Esquivel works on anti-money laundering and terrorism financing and asset recovery in Latin America and the Horn of Africa. She led the Bank’s first work on illicit flows, on the effects of the cocaine trade on the economy in Colombia and leads multiple World Bank projects in strengthening the capacity to investigate tax crimes.