Financial Transparency Coalition

For many developing countries, natural resource wealth offers a potential way out of persistant poverty. There are few places in the world where this is as true as Niger, a landlocked country with a per-capita GDP of just US$400. The country has substantial mining exports and potential oil reserves, but an opaque financial system empowers a corrupt and increasingly autocratic regime, and little wealth from natural resources has reached the people on the ground. Niger ranks 186th out of 187 countries on the UN Human Development Index.

WASHINGTON DC—Global Financial Integrity (GFI), a Washington DC-based research and advocacy organization, urged the Securities and Exchange Commission today to deny the suspension request made by the American Petroleum Institute for recently finalized rules implementing Dodd-Frank Section 1504 transparency requirements for oil, gas, and mining companies.

LONDON - Global Witness is outraged by a lawsuit filed by the American Petroleum Institute (API), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others to gut Section 1504, an important anti-corruption provision of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. (1) By seeking to nullify this provision, API, whose members include British Petroleum, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell, and other industry groups are demonstrating that they have something to hide. Any claims by API that they support transparency efforts are preposterous when they are not only trying to weaken the rules but to strike Section 1504 in its...

The resource curse has long been a problem for Africa. The continent’s economies have remained stagnant and hollow for nearly 60 years while a succession of autocrats and their clients have become fabulously wealthy. With huge natural gas discoveries off of the Mozambican coast, vast newfound oil reserves in the Great Lakes region and more than $1 trillion worth of minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo, there is vast potential for another wasted generation.