Notes from Prague: The Seminars of the CII AGM 2026
By Goro Koyama, CEO and Lead Investigator, Japan PI Inc.
In September 2026, I traveled to Prague for the Annual General Meeting of the Council of International Investigators (CII). Beyond the association’s business and the chance to reconnect with colleagues from around the world, the heart of any AGM is its educational program. This year, 13 presenters from seven countries covered everything from sanctions evasion and counterfeit supply chains to street-level surveillance and the responsible use of artificial intelligence.
First Impressions of the Former Eastern Bloc
This trip to the Czech Republic was my first time setting foot in a former Eastern Bloc country, and my first time in a Slavic nation. Both CII and the World Association of Detectives (WAD) have members scattered across the globe. Still, both trace their origins to Chicago, United States, and have long been run mainly by members from Western countries. In Asia, AGMs have been held in places such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and India, all former parts of the British Empire, but AGMs in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe are rare. This was the first time CII had held its AGM in the former Eastern Bloc.
Communist states inevitably become one-party dictatorships, and such systems do not give private citizens the freedom to gather information. In that sense, it seems likely that the communist era was a difficult environment in which the private investigation industry could develop. More than thirty years have now passed since communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, beginning with the Velvet Revolution of 1989 in what was then Czechoslovakia. Capitalism and liberal democracy have taken root, and the Czech Republic now has an investigation firm capable of hosting a CII AGM.
Even Germany, the economic core of Europe, has no formal licensing system for private investigators. I believe one reason may be that the eastern part of the country remained under a communist system until reunification in 1990. Communist and socialist systems, it seems, are not a natural fit for the investigation profession.
My Uber driver from Prague’s airport happened to be from Uzbekistan, and on the way into the city, he shared his perspective on the former Eastern Bloc and the Slavic countries. Because Uzbekistan was part of the Soviet Union, many people there speak Russian. He explained that anyone who speaks Russian can pick up other Slavic languages, such as Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Slovenian, and Bulgarian, without much difficulty, because they share so much with Russian, which lowers the barrier to working or settling in these countries.
He also told me that the Czech Republic has a large Vietnamese community. Vietnam and communist-era Czechoslovakia belonged to the same socialist bloc. They had close ties, and as a legacy of that period, many Vietnamese people still feel an affinity for the Czech Republic and have made their homes there. It was moving to realize that the Cold War, which ended more than thirty years ago, still shapes people’s lives today.
Hearing all this, I felt firsthand that Europe has a broad dividing line between the former communist, former Soviet, and Slavic-speaking world and the rest of the continent. At the same time, European countries share land borders, and language and religion do not neatly follow those borders. Jewish diaspora communities exist in countless countries, and within Slavic lands, there are intertwined communities of German, Hungarian, Italian, and other speakers. The Czech lands were long part of the Habsburg Austrian Empire, later Austria-Hungary, and, after the First World War, joined with Slovakia to form Czechoslovakia. The two separated in 1993, creating the Czech Republic as it exists today. As a Slavic nation located in the very center of Europe, the country has seen its system of government and politics shift dramatically throughout its history.
It is striking that our AGM took place in a former communist country, for a profession shaped largely in the West, so long after the end of the Cold War.
Prague is a fascinating place. As several speakers reminded us, the city has long served as a crossroads of intelligence activity, and the Czech Republic now stands on the front line of many cross-border issues our profession confronts daily. Below, I introduce each seminar I attended and summarize its key points. With this background in mind, it is interesting that an AGM was held in a former communist country, in a profession that has developed mainly in the West, now that so much time has passed since the end of the Cold War.
A note before reading: the summaries below reflect the presenters’ own views, experiences, and assessments as shared in the sessions. They are offered as a record of the discussion, not as independent findings by the Japan PI.
The Program at a Glance
| # | Seminar | Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Russian Influence and Czech Laundromat | Jiří Hynek |
| 2 | Anti-Counterfeiting in South Asia | Sanjay Kaushik, CII |
| 3 | International Fraud | Dr. Robert Pelikán |
| 4 | The Financial System of Terrorist Organizations | Dr. Ehud (Udi) Levi |
| 5 | MUSADO – Self-Defense and Close Combat System | Oldřich Šelenberk |
| 6 | Lessons from the Cold War – Peek Through the Looking-Glass into the Future of Investigations | Roman Bazikalov, CII |
| 7 | Fraud Cases and the Lessons Learned | Bernhard Maier, CII |
| 8 | The Burn Factor – How One Wrong Move in Surveillance Can Cost Everything | Sam Zonensein, CII |
| 9 | OSINT for Insider Risk Management | Daniel Bertrand, CII |
| 10 | Panel Discussion: Artificial Intelligence | Panelists: Aayush Kaushik, Paddy Beiner, Roman Bazikalov, Dr. Lev Topor / Moderator: David MacLeod, CII |
1. Russian Influence and Czech Laundromat
Jiří Hynek, investigative journalist
Jiří Hynek, a Czech investigative journalist with more than 20 years of experience, much of it at Czech Television, opened the program by examining Russian money and influence in the Czech Republic. He now reports for odkryto.com (“uncovered”), a site he co-founded, and is the author of a book on what he calls Russia’s comeback in the Czech Republic.
Hynek explained how weak anti-money-laundering controls in the 1990s made the country attractive to Russian capital. According to his reporting, politicians, businesspeople, and people linked to organized crime bought hotels, spa facilities, and homes, especially in the spa town of Karlovy Vary, often with cash, both to secure funds and to create a haven for their families. He described local nominees acting as “white horses” to hold assets and to secure cases in which land was rezoned and protected areas were altered, with the help of compliant officials.
A central theme was the limited reach of sanctions. Hynek argued that many owners anticipated sanctions after the 2014 Crimea crisis and moved assets into the names of other individuals or offshore companies in jurisdictions such as Cyprus, the Seychelles, and Bermuda, so only a minority of relevant assets are actually caught. He also highlighted newer channels, including cryptocurrency, specialized exchange businesses, and “flow-through accounts,” through which Czech shell companies route funds from Russia onward through banks in the Baltic states or Moldova.
On political influence, Hynek assessed that Russia’s direct sway over the Czech establishment has weakened since the Zeman presidency, pointing to the election of President Petr Pavel and the expulsion of Russian diplomats after Czech authorities attributed the 2014 Vrbětice ammunition depot explosions to Russian military intelligence. Influence operations, however, continue through disinformation, fake videos, and attempts to shape elections.
2. Anti-Counterfeiting in South Asia
Sanjay Kaushik, CII
Sanjay Kaushik, founder of Netrika Consulting and a CII member with 33 years in investigations and security, gave a practical, case-driven view of counterfeiting in India and its neighbors. His firm has grown to some 350 investigators across eight Indian cities, Dubai, and Singapore.
He described South Asia as a huge and growing market that is difficult to police. Porous borders among India, Nepal, and Bangladesh allow counterfeit goods to move alongside legitimate trade, and garment factories in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka that produce for global brands can also turn out unauthorized goods using the same materials and labels. When a seizure in India points to a manufacturer abroad, there is often no automatic mechanism to pursue it across the border. Enforcement within India also varies from state to state and can be affected by local politics.
Kaushik stressed that counterfeiting is not a victimless commercial offense. He recounted a tobacco investigation in which detonators were found in one of the containers, and cases involving counterfeit painkillers, surgical products, brake parts, and motor oil. Online, the challenge is the speed at which sellers relaunch under new names and numbers: in one case, his team removed 300,000 fraudulent links in the first week and was still removing 20 to 25 a week more than a year later. He concluded that takedowns alone are not enough. Investigators must connect online listings to the people, warehouses, couriers, and payment flows behind them, preserve evidence immediately, and prepare every case as if it will end up in court.
3. International Fraud
Dr. Robert Pelikán, attorney and arbitrator
Dr. Robert Pelikán, who has led the litigation practice at the regional law firm Wolf Theiss for several years, offered something investigators rarely hear: a litigator’s view of where we fit into corporate internal investigations.
He walked through how internal investigations work, typically triggered by a whistleblower report or a criminal investigation touching the company or its management. The review focuses on data the company controls, collected forensically from a limited number of custodians and handled within GDPR limits. Keyword searching and layered human review remain the backbone; his team is testing AI but, so far, treats it as a supplementary layer rather than a replacement.
His key point was that internal reviews usually produce red flags, not proof. Fraud often occurs partly outside the company, so internal records may justify preventive or employment measures but may fall short of the standard required for civil recovery or criminal proceedings. This is where external investigators add value, both by supplying context and by gathering evidence. He urged investigators to tell counsel exactly how evidence was obtained, since courts in different jurisdictions treat questionable sources very differently. He also highlighted asset tracing, uncovering hidden control among companies, and locating defendants who try to evade service, citing a case in which proof of a debtor’s actual whereabouts enabled successful service.
4. The Financial System of Terrorist Organizations
Dr. Ehud (Udi) Levi
Dr. Udi Levi, an intelligence specialist with around 30 years of experience, including more than 15 years leading an Israeli task force on financial measures against crime and terrorism, argued that money is the essential infrastructure of every hostile actor. An organization that cannot move money, he said, is effectively disabled, and disrupting financial flows can achieve more than conventional security measures.
He framed terrorist financing in three parts: sources, transfer channels, and end uses. In his assessment, banks remain the most important channel, alongside money changers, shell and trading companies, and, increasingly, cryptoassets. He emphasized that blockchain activity leaves traceable “fingerprints” for investigators with the right tools. He also described growing cooperation between terrorist organizations and organized crime, particularly in drug trafficking and fraud, and warned that AI will make cyber-enabled fraud easier.
For our profession, his most relevant message was about opportunity. Governments, litigants, and companies increasingly need financial investigation and asset-tracing capabilities that many public bodies lack. In his view, private investigators with the right expertise, technology, and sources will see growing demand over the next decade. In the Q&A, he acknowledged that there is still no good general mechanism for sharing sensitive findings, such as links to scam compounds, with authorities.
5. MUSADO – Self-Defense and Close Combat System
Oldřich Šelenberk
This session was a practical, hands-on demonstration of MUSADO, a self-defense and close-combat system, rather than a lecture. After a morning of data, sanctions, and AI, it was a welcome reminder of the physical side of our work. I have long believed that investigation requires physical readiness as well as intellect, and this demonstration made that point more vividly than any slide could.
6. Lessons from the Cold War – Peek Through the Looking-Glass into the Future of Investigations
Roman Bazikalov, CII
Roman Bazikalov, a CII board member based in Montreal, used Prague’s espionage history as a lens on the future of investigations. Through AI-generated video segments, he showed how classic tradecraft such as dead drops, microfilm and double agents have digital equivalents today: encrypted handoffs, online reconnaissance before any fieldwork, and fake profiles that can be built in minutes.
He acknowledged AI’s advantages in speed, scale and pattern recognition, but argued that it cannot replace trust-building, empathy, common sense, moral judgment or situational awareness. He was blunt about confidentiality risks, describing an investigator who uploaded client financial data and surveillance video into an AI tool to generate reports. Bazikalov said he is assembling a team to develop AI security, privacy, and prompt guidelines for CII members.
He also addressed a question many of us hear: why hire an investigator when the client has already run database or AI searches? His answer was that databases show what is already known, while trained professionals identify emerging risks and “unknown unknowns”. He named active listening, elicitation, rapport building, cross-cultural fluency, deception detection, lateral thinking, and persuasive report writing as the skills that will set investigators apart. The discussion that followed, including whether AI might one day predict a subject’s behavior, was lively and unresolved.
7. Fraud Cases and the Lessons Learned
Bernhard Maier, CII
Bernhard Maier presented three European cases, each showing how control weaknesses, rather than a lack of detection tools, enabled the losses.
In the first, an Austrian online bank saw a cluster of consumer-loan defaults. The borrowers were real people who had used the same unlicensed broker, who altered their documents to meet the bank’s criteria. The broker turned out to be married to the bank employee approving the loans. The bank has since introduced conflict-of-interest disclosure and screening.
In the second case, a real estate company’s director had personally guaranteed a corporate loan, but after the company’s insolvency, the bank could not find him. The real person, traced in Poland, had reported his identity document lost before the companies were created, and his signature did not match public records. Because corporate guarantors were not subject to the residence checks applied to private borrowers, the bank was left with a shortfall of around 70,000 to 80,000 euros.
In the third, a credit insurer faced a claim over construction materials supposedly delivered to a buyer that later went bankrupt. Open-source research and site visits showed a company without the required license, with recently changed owners, management, and address, and a “storage facility” that was a damaged, unused building.
The lesson: historical company data can be misleading when a business has effectively been replaced by a new one shortly before a transaction. The discussion also touched on sales-target pressure on credit teams and the growing threat of deepfakes to video-based identity checks.
8. The Burn Factor – How One Wrong Move in Surveillance Can Cost Everything
Sam Zonensein, CII
After much talk of technology, Sam Zonensein brought us back to the street. Surveillance, he reminded us, is different from interviews or document work because the investigator controls neither the environment nor the subject’s next move.
He insisted on a minimum two-person team and on honest expectation-setting with clients: subjects can be lost, and a single operative is unreliable. Good preparation means a current photo, advance knowledge of entrances, parking, and access restrictions, and arriving early to walk the area. He warned against visibly hiding, which draws suspicion, and against asking local shopkeepers about a target in a small community. Equipment and cover stories must fit the setting; a covert coffee-cup camera looks odd where there is no coffee shop.
He outlined the stages of being “burned”, from unnoticed suspicion to hostile neighbors, police intervention, or contact from a subject’s associates, and stressed thorough handovers between shifts on long jobs. The discussion on whether to notify police in advance revealed real differences between countries, with colleagues from Ontario and Ireland describing notification as common practice, while in some European countries, surveillance is heavily restricted. His final principle was simple: no subject is worth compromising an investigator’s safety.
9. OSINT for Insider Risk Management
Daniel Bertrand, CII
Daniel Bertrand, a Canadian investigator with around 40 years of experience, including service with the RCMP, examined how open-source intelligence supports insider risk investigations. He treated insider risk as a distinct discipline covering malicious insiders, negligence, compromised accounts, coerced staff, third-party exposure, residual access held by former employees, and, more recently, AI agents operating within corporate systems.
Citing a 2026 Ponemon Institute study, he put the average cost of an insider incident at around US$19.5 million, with costs rising the longer containment is delayed. He described insider risk management as a “team sport” that requires investigators, HR, legal, IT, and privacy specialists to work together, with the investigator’s role being to provide reliable external context, not to act as the disciplinary decision-maker.
Bertrand defined OSINT as structured, documented research using public sources and was clear that public availability does not remove legal or ethical duties. He set out a lifecycle of mandate, planning, collection, validation, correlation, preservation, reporting and review, and urged investigators to document methods and limitations, distinguish facts from inferences, and hash preserved evidence with SHA-256 or stronger. His operational security advice included using dedicated devices or virtual machines, avoiding personal accounts, and avoiding interaction with a subject’s online presence.
10. Panel Discussion: Artificial Intelligence
Panelists: Aayush Kaushik (Netrika Consulting), Paddy Beiner, Roman Bazikalov (CII), and Dr. Lev Topor / Moderator: David MacLeod, CII
The closing panel, moderated by David MacLeod of Australia, brought together Aayush Kaushik of Netrika Consulting (India), Paddy Beiner (Germany), Roman Bazikalov (Canada) and Dr. Lev Topor (Israel) to discuss the responsible use of AI in investigations. The consensus was clear: AI is already a useful accelerator for defined tasks such as language editing, large-scale document review, transcription and image analysis, but it must not replace the investigator’s judgment or responsibility for the final report.
The panelists compared privacy frameworks, including India’s DPDP Act, Europe’s GDPR, Canada’s PIPEDA and Quebec’s Law 25, and Israel’s privacy law. The practical advice for cross-border work was to apply the strictest rules relevant to the investigator, the subject, the client, and the report’s destination. There was a clear divide between cloud services, where personal data should be avoided or anonymized, and locally hosted, isolated systems, which Dr. Topor estimated cost roughly US$20,000 to 35,000 to set up.
Hallucinations remain a real concern. Bazikalov reported that his firm found many discrepancies when comparing AI output against manually completed investigations. Another point that stayed with me came from Beiner, who described a client that allowed AI for language editing but banned it from processing human-source reporting, because paraphrasing or translation can change a source’s tone and meaning. The panel agreed that professional associations are well placed to develop practical best-practice guidance while national regulation remains fragmented.
Closing Thoughts
Looking back across the program, a few themes stood out. First, money and assets increasingly move through layers of nominees, offshore companies, and new payment channels, and tracing them requires cross-border cooperation. Second, many losses come not from sophisticated schemes but from basic control gaps: unchecked conflicts of interest, weak identity verification and outdated due diligence. Third, technology is changing how we work, but every speaker, whether discussing surveillance, OSINT or AI, came back to the same point: the investigator remains accountable for the method, the evidence and the conclusions.
For Japan PI, much of our work involves cross-border locate investigations, due diligence, and litigation support for international clients. The practical insights shared in Prague and the trusted network that CII provides across more than 150 countries are directly relevant to how we serve those clients. My thanks go to the organizers, the presenters, and all the colleagues who made this year’s AGM such a valuable experience.
