Benjamin Nénot

Principal, Synergy Global Consulting France

Benjamin has more than 10 years’ experience in environmental and social performance in the natural resources sectors. His experience includes working with companies to develop, execute or review their social performance commitments and obligations. He serves as a project manager, consultant, and auditor where he has gained extensive experience in field research, due diligence reviews and impact assessments while working with international companies and organizations. Much of his work includes assessing social programmes, resettlement activities and management systems using national legislation and the reference standards of the Equator Principles Financial Institutions, the IFC, World Bank, OECD and ICMM. He is a trained ISO 14001 lead auditor. He also counts with vast experience in managing conflicts between communities and projects, accompanying the different stages of resettlement projects, and ensuring land access.

During his career, Mr. Nénot has developed a focus on human rights, due diligence, artisanal mining and large-scale mining, conflict minerals and more broadly social issues related to the extractive industries. He is the project manager for Synergy’s independent evaluation services to the ITRI’s Tin Supply Chain Initiative (iTSCi) programme (upstream minerals traceability programme in conflict affected areas). Benjamin has a particularly strong experience working in Africa and is fluent in French, English and Spanish.

Grant Angwin

President, Angwin PMAs

Grant Angwin was, until recently, the President of Asahi Refining NA - the world’s largest gold and silver refiner.  A veteran of the industry, Grant worked for Johnson Matthey for more than 25 years holding various senior management roles in the UK before moving to the USA to head up the North American businesses. He led the sale of the Johnson Matthey refineries to the Asahi Refining five years ago. 

His experience includes being the former Chairman of the London Bullion Market Association, past Member of the Shanghai Gold Exchange International Advisors Board and Board Member of the Silver Institute.  He sits on the ICE Benchmark PMOC for the LBMA Gold and Silver prices.  Grant recently started a precious metals advisory company.

José Ramon Camino

General Counsel, Metalor Technologies SA

Jose Ramon Camino is a lawyer and member of the executive committee of the Swiss multinational Company Metalor Technologies, group that he joined in 2014 as Group General Counsel. He is responsible for the legal, compliance and communication’s affairs  for the Metalor Group. In his previous life he worked during 16 years with the US aluminum company Alcoa as President of the Spanish operations and European VP Legal & Corporate based in Geneva. Previously he worked as legal counsel for IBM Spain (Madrid) and IBM Eastern Europe based in Vienna.

He started his career with the law firm Baker & Mckenzie in the Madrid office.  He has been included by Legal 500 in the General Counsel Power list of Switzerland 2019, 2018, 2016 & 2015  www.legal500.com. He has lived in Spain, France, Austria, USA and Switzerland and speaks Spanish, English and French.

Matthew Chambers

Chair, Chambers Federation

Matthew is an impact investor, social entrepreneur and chair of the Chambers Federation. He has managed the family business for more than 20 years, expanding operations to the Philippines, Kenya & the DRC. The Chambers Federation is an award winning, US-based, accredited impact investment firm. Recipient the US Secretary of State's Award for Corporate Excellence (ACE), the Federation specializes in women’s economic empowerment, responsible sourcing and value addition in the artisanal cocoa, coffee and gold sectors.

Matthew led in the formalization of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s chocolate and jewelry sectors including the first chocolate facility and ASM gold jewelry production line in country, with value chains made up entirely of women. Matthew is also a board member of Alliance for Responsible Mining.

Ruth Crowell

Chief Executive, LBMA

Ruth was appointed Chief Executive of the LBMA in January 2014. She is responsible for the success and strategic development of the LBMA, in partnership with the Chairman and the Board. She is also responsible for maintaining accountability to and the quality of, the Association's Membership and Good Delivery Refiners as well as representing the interests of the Association in relation to regulators, investors, media and international precious metals markets.

Before being appointed Chief Executive, she spent seven years working in the Association, initially as Commercial Director and then as Deputy Chief Executive, where she acted as the main lead on Governmental Affairs. She was also responsible for the Association's work on supply chain due diligence, with particular regard to the creation and implementation of the LBMA’s Responsible Gold Guidance. She has represented the Association at industry, governmental and multi-stakeholder regulatory forums. She continues to serve as Vice Chair of the OECD Multi-Stakeholder Governance Group for Responsible Minerals. As Commercial Director, she oversaw the development of the LBMA Conference, the LBMA's quarterly publication the Alchemist and the LBMA website.

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Diana Culillas

Secretary General, Swiss Better Gold Association (SBGA)

Diana started her professional path at the International Committee of the Red Cross in the context of the first Russian-Chechen conflict. She then spent 14 years in Africa, Asia and the Middle East by being involved in different humanitarian projects. From 2008 to 2018, as the CSR Manager at Chopard Group, she established and oversaw numerous sourcing, environmental, work-life balance and philanthropic initiatives of the brand.

Today, Diana leads the SBGA, a pioneering network of industry, finance and service providers representing Swiss gold industry, which supports sustainable development of artisanal small-scale miners and establishes responsible gold value chains from these operations to end market.

Pamela Fierst-Walsh

Senior Advisor on Conflict & Critical Minerals and U.S. Representative to the Kimberley Process  
Office of Threat Finance and Countermeasures (EB/TFS/TFC) Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs U.S. Department of State

Pamela Fierst-Walsh has focused on critical foreign policy and national security issues throughout her career, including counterterrorism, atrocities prevention, and humanitarian assistance. Pamela advises senior U.S. officials and private sector figures on responsible mineral sourcing. Her team works closely with consumer electronic companies, automobile manufacturers, and jewelers to develop coherent public-private approaches to vexing supply chain issues.  

Pamela appears in the Top 100 Corporate Social Responsibility Influencers in 2019, according to data management company Assent Compliance. She played a key role in shaping the 2019 U.S. Federal Strategy on Critical Minerals to improve U.S. competitiveness for clean energy and technological advancement. She is a graduate of the Indiana University Maurer School of Law and the National Defense University’s National War College.
 

Luke Fiske

PhD Candidate, Queen's University & Academic Partner, IMPACT

Luke Fiske is currently a PhD candidate in International Business Strategy at Queen's University, focusing on the sustainability and management of multinational supply chains. His particular focus is risk perception and risk-mitigation strategies among mining firms and how multi-stakeholder partnerships are used to alleviate risk. In addition to being a PhD student, Luke is an academic partner at the Canadian non-profit organization IMPACT. He uses mixed-methods (both qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys) to work alongside IMPACT to answer many pressing questions about the management of natural resources in conflict-affected areas.

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Before becoming a researcher, Luke Fiske was a faculty member at New York University, in the Expository Writing Program. For a number of years, he also ran the case-writing unit at the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University, and developed case studies on some of North America’s largest companies. He holds an MBA from the University of Cape Town and an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Cape Town.  

Mark Hanna

Chief Marketing Officer, Richline Group, Inc.

Mark Hanna is the chief marketing officer of Richline Group. With over 46 years in the jewelry industry, Mark has had experience in all facets of management, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and compliance. Prior to Richline Group, Mark served as the president of Dalow Industries, the president of Leach Garner International and EVP of sales and marketing for both Bel-Oro and Michael Anthony Jewelers. Mark was honored as one of the U.S.’s top 200 Chief Marketing Officers in both 2012 and 2015. In 2018, Mark was honored as CMO of the year: Corporate Social Responsibility, by the CMO Club.

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Mark is an active speaker and advocate for responsible issues including The National Retail Federation, JIS Responsible panels, U.S. Wildlife Council, Pure Earth, and the Responsible Artisanal Gold Forum. Mark holds a master of business administration from the NYU Stern School of Business. Additionally, he serves as a board member of the Special Olympics, U.S. Wildlife Trafficking Alliance, and the Responsible Jewellery Council.

Neil Harby

CChem - Chief Technical Officer, LBMA

As Chief Technical Officer for the LBMA, Neil’s responsibilities include acting as the Executive’s main contact for the Good Delivery system for GD Refiners, applicants and LBMA Committees. His duties include managing the LBMA Good Delivery accreditation system, including applications, Pro-Active Monitoring, Proficiency Testing and other GD related projects. The role also involves overseeing the work of the GDL Officer in the administration of the Good Delivery system as well as managing the implementation by gold Good Delivery refiners of the LBMA’s Responsible Gold Guidance and ensuring the efficiency and effectiveness of the Good Delivery work carried out by the LBMA.

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Having nine years' experience in the Platinum Industry and having held the position as a member of the South African Organising Committee of the Royal Society of Chemistry, he brings to the role a wealth of experience having previously been Head of Evaluation at the Rand Refinery in South Africa. See full bio.

Joanne Lebert

Executive Director, IMPACT

Joanne joined IMPACT in 2011 and leads our work to improve how natural resources are managed where security and human rights are at risk. Her work has focused on contributing to responsibly-sourced, conflict-free minerals and she has helped Central African governments launch and implement a regional strategy to tackle conflict minerals. Joanne is a policy advisor, frequent guest speaker, and trainer to policymakers, private sector representatives, and civil society organizations.

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Previously, Joanne was based at the University of Ottawa’s Human Rights Research and Education Centre. She focused on gender-based violence in conflict settings in Africa and how it is impacted by the extractives industry. She was also Deputy Director of the Canadian non-profit, Peacebuild, where she worked to strengthen Canadian foreign policy options and practice. She carried out anthropological fieldwork for her doctoral studies in Namibia and Angola and was a Visiting Fellow in Refugee Studies at the University of Oxford. She has lectured at Carleton University and worked for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, Amnesty International, and CARE International in Zambia.

Sasha Lezhnev

Deputy Director of Policy, The Sentry

Sasha Lezhnev is Deputy Director of Policy at the Sentry, where he focuses on conflict, governance, and corruption issues in central Africa. The Sentry is an investigative and policy team that follows the dirty money connected to African war criminals and transnational war profiteers and seeks to shut those benefiting from violence out of the international financial system. He is a founding member of the Public-Private Alliance on Responsible Minerals Trade (PPA). Sasha is also Founding Director of the Grassroots Reconciliation Group, an organization that runs projects with former child soldiers in northern Uganda. He previously worked at Global Witness, the International Crisis Group, and the U.S. Institute of Peace on U.S. policy issues on conflict resources, extractive industries transparency, and peace processes in Africa.

Sasha was based in Uganda for 2 1/2 years as Senior Program Officer with the Northern Uganda Peace Initiative and advisor to the chief mediator of the peace process with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). He is author of the book Crafting Peace: Strategies to Deal with Warlords in Collapsing States. He holds a Master's in International Relations from Cambridge University and a B.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University.  

Susannah McLaren

Compliance & Responsible Sourcing Manager, LBMA

Susannah manages the LBMA’s Responsible Sourcing Programme for precious metals, which is mandatory for all Good Delivery List Refiners. She is an expert in human rights and broader sustainability, with over 15 years' in-house and consultancy experience in the field.

Prior to joining the LBMA, Susannah worked for Shift - the leading centre of expertise on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights - where she advised leading companies serious about human rights.

Susannah previously spent ten years employed with global engineering services provider to the extractives and infrastructure markets Amec Foster Wheeler (now Wood), latterly as the Head of Social Sustainability. Susannah has also served on the Advisory Group to the UK Network of the UN Global Compact and as Vice Chair of Building Responsibly, a group of leading engineering and construction companies working together to raise the bar in promoting the rights and welfare of workers across the industry. See full bio.

Sakhila Mirza

LBMA Executive Board Director & General Counsel

In her role as General Counsel of the London Bullion Market Association and also an Executive member of the LBMA Board, Sakhila has been involved in, and taken the lead on a number of projects of the Association. This has included, but not limited to: working closely with the CEO on the strategic direction of the LBMA; transitioning all of the four precious metals benchmarks onto electronic platforms by working with the service providers as well as regulators; leading the draft and launch of the Precious Metals Code; working with external service provider to enhance transparency in the precious metals market by launching the LBMA trade reporting initiative; and providing for lobbying efforts on behalf of members on a number of issues, for example EU Conflicts Minerals regulation, Net Stable Funding Ratio amongst other regulations.

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Sakhila brings with her a wealth of experience having previously worked in the energy and commodities industry where she dealt with compliance, legal and regulatory matters. Sakhila read law at the London School of Economics and went onto qualify as a solicitor. See full bio.

Andrew Parsons

Vice President, Group Sustainable Development, Gold Fields

Dr Andrew Parsons is Vice President Group Sustainable Development at Gold Fields. He joined the company in 2016. He is responsible for defining and implementing the company’s sustainability strategy, which focuses on energy, climate change, water stewardship, integrated mine closure, community acceptance and integrating sustainability into the business. He was previously Vice President: Group Environmental Systems and Integration at AngloGold Ashanti. Before that he was the Program Director: Environment, Safety and Health at the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), an association of leading mining and metals companies, based in London.

Andrew worked at the Chamber of Mines of South Africa from 1994 – 1997 and 2000 – 2004 in the fields of environmental, safety and technology policy. He was seconded to the United Nations Environment Programme in Paris, from 1998 – 1999. He has a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and is married with 2 children.

Jennifer Peyser

Senior Mediator & Director of Ethical Resource Program, RESOLVE.

Jennifer Peyser is the Director of RESOLVE’s Ethical Resource Program. She has over 15 years of experience in designing and leading proactive, global, multi-stakeholder partnerships and strategies related to the use of natural resources. She advises industry, NGOs, and government, and supports collaborative problem solving to address high-profile and high-stakes sustainability challenges, with an emphasis on responsible supply chains. Jennifer’s projects respond to responsible sourcing challenges at the intersection of human rights and natural resource use. Her work has particularly focused on the mining and minerals sector, including artisanal gold. For example, she worked with companies, government, and NGOs to design and launch, and now facilitates the Public-Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade and the Responsible Artisanal Gold Solutions Forum. Jennifer also has expertise in supply chain mapping, research, and joint fact finding; multi-stakeholder standards and standards-setting processes such as CRAFT; and creation of other due diligence and responsible sourcing tools and guidance.

Jennifer earned her master’s degree in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Environmental Policy Group. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Science and a Bachelor of Arts in French from Iowa State University.

Dr Mark Pieth

Professor of Criminal Law and Criminology at the University of Basel

Dr Mark Pieth is since 1993 Professor of Criminal Law and Criminology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He has served twice as Dean of the Basel Law School. In 2014 he has been presented with an honorary doctorate by Sussex University, UK. As an academic he has published extensively in the areas of economic crime, criminal law, criminal procedure and sanctioning. From 1989 to 1993, Mark Pieth was Head of Section on Economic and Organised Crime at the Swiss Federal Office of Justice. During this time he was a Member of the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF). From 1990 to 2013 he chaired the OECD Working Group on Bribery. In 2004 and 2005 he was a Member of the Independent Inquiry Committee into the UN’s Oil-for-Food Programme in Iraq (“Volcker Committee”).

He has been a Member of the Independent Advisory Board of The World Bank Group (IAB), chaired both the Independent Governance Committee (IGC) and the Sanction Appeals Board of the African Development Bank (AfDB). He is currently a Member of the Vetting Panel of the IAAF and he has been asked to join the Expert Advisory Group on Transparency of the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB/BID). Mark Pieth is the founder and Chair of the Basel Institute on Governance (BIG). In this capacity he has co-initiated several collective actions, including the Wolfsberg Banking Group and the WEF’s Partnering Against Corruption Initiative (PACI). 
 

Monica Rubiolo

Head Trade Promotion, Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs SECO

Monica Rubiolo is Head of Trade Promotion at the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs SECO. She leads SECO’s efforts to foster trade in developing countries that is socially responsible, environmentally friendly, inclusive and thereby sustainable. This includes supporting framework conditions for sustainable trade, enhancing international competitiveness and market access of SMEs and producers alike, and strengthening a resource-efficient private sector in partner countries.

Monica Rubiolo obtained her PhD from the University of Tübingen, Germany, and published extensively on issues related to economic development. She was Assistant Professor at the Catholic University in Cordoba (Argentina) and has also taught at the Universities of Tübingen (Germany) and Bilbao (Spain). She has worked in Taipei, Taiwan, and at the European Institute of Latin American Studies (IRELA) in Madrid. She joined SECO in 2003, focusing on public financial management and financial sector support.

Dr Kevin Telmer

Executive Director, Artisanal Gold Council

Kevin received his PhD from the University of Ottawa in Geochemistry and held a tenured Professorship at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria from 1999
until 2011 before transitioning to the full time lead of the Artisanal Gold Council. He started his
work in artisanal mining in 1995 in the Brazilian Amazon and in the following 25 years has worked in numerous countries across three continents.

Kevin has extensive experience in technical, policy, and business capacities in the field with miners, governments, international institutions, and industry. He has become a world renowned expert and a voice on the international stage with numerous publications on the issue, including authoring the global estimate on mercury use in artisanal gold mining used to negotiate the Minamata Convention, and providing key input to the OECD’s Due Diligence Guidance on responsible sourcing of artisanal gold.

Iris Van der Veken

Executive Director for Responsible Jewellery Council

Iris has a background in law and international relations. A sustainability pioneer, leadership executive, humanitarian, and coalition-builder, with more than 20 years of global experience working in fast-paced environments including technology, diamonds, jewellery, fashion, and government.  She initiated and Chaired the United Nations Global Compact Network Belgium. She was honoured by the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Trade and European Affairs for her leadership role in initiating the Global Compact Network Belgium and for her work on promoting corporate social responsibility in Belgium and abroad with a focus on human rights including children’s rights and the role of business. Iris is committed to the agenda of gender equality.  

She was appointed as RJC Executive Director in March 2019 and is dedicated to a ‘members first’ strategy and contributing towards the 2030 agenda and the 17 Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs). She is member of the Board of ISEAL and the Jewellers Vigilance Committee. Iris has been an active volunteer for the Special Olympics for over 30 years. She ran the NY marathon for UNICEF.

Ian Warman

Head of Commodities Operations, Europe, Standard Chartered Bank

Ian began his Bullion career at JP Morgan in 1990 in Operations and held many roles in across a wide range of physical Commodities. He was very active in the Aurum development for Unallocated Clearing and acted as project manager for the LPMCL and JP Morgan in defining, developing and the testing of Aurum. He joined Credit Agricole in 2007 to develop their Middle Office and Operations capability across Base metals, Energy and Bullion, and later building the capabilities to support European physical Gas and Power. 

In 2013, Ian joined the Standard Chartered Bank Commodities team as Head of Commodities Operations for Europe. Ian current role is Head Precious Metal Transaction management unit, and his team - who are based in Singapore and London - are responsible for the management of the global inventory of all Standard Chartered entities. SCB have a significant Bullion derivative and physical global business with a strong physical capability in India, China and the Middle East. Responsible sourcing of Precious Metals is something taken seriously by SCB and in Ian’s role as Chair of the LBMA Physical Committee.