Julia Yansura
Julia Yansura is the Program Director for Environmental Crime and Illicit Finance at the FACT Coalition. Her work aims to close anti money laundering and anti corruption loopholes that allow the proceeds of environmental crime to be laundered into the U.S. financial system. Geographically, her work is focused on the Western Hemisphere.
Prior to joining FACT, Yansura served as Program Director for Latin America and the Caribbean at Global Financial Integrity, where she led projects in Colombia, Belize, Ecuador and El Salvador covering environmental crimes such as illegal mining and logging, as well as on other topics such as beneficial ownership, real estate, cryptocurrency, and international trade. From 2012-2019, Yansura worked at the Inter-American Dialogue on remittances, mobile money and financial inclusion. She remains passionate about financial inclusion and is convinced that it is possible to make our shared financial system both secure and inclusive.
Yansura is fluent in English and Spanish and has experience working in Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Jamaica, and Belize. She holds an MA in Latin American Studies from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and a BA in Russian from Grinnell College.
Ben Batros
Ben Batros is Director of Legal Strategy at CCCA, providing strategic guidance to teams of lawyers and analysts supporting enforcement and litigation to address illegal conduct that drives climate change – including the role of financial institutions in enabling climate destructive activities and the role of financial offences in tackling those that profit from them. He also consults on the strategic use of legal tools to support social change, with a focus on accountability and supporting climate action, at Strategy for Humanity.
Ben has 20 years’ experience in accountability mechanisms and strategic litigation, previously having conducted strategic human rights litigation at the Open Society Justice Initiative; served as Appeals Counsel in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court; and worked for the Australian Attorney-General’s Department on regional cooperation to combat transnational crime and on multilateral efforts to promote international justice.
Luis E. Fernandez
Luis E. Fernandez is a research professor and senior fellow at Wake Forest University’s Sabin Center for Environment and Sustainability, and the co-founder of CINCIA (Centro de Innovación Científica Amazónica), an independent environmental research center in the Peruvian Amazon.
With more than 20 years of experience working across the Amazon Basin, his work focuses on environmental crime, mercury pollution from artisanal and small-scale gold mining, and the links between illicit economies, environmental harm, and governance failures. He has previously held research and policy positions at Stanford University, the Carnegie Institution for Science, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and Argonne National Laboratory, and has advised national governments and multilateral organizations on strategies to address environmental and financial crime associated with illegal mining.