Financial Transparency Coalition

LONDON - As the scandal grows around a Nigerian oil deal involving Shell and Italian firm Eni who made a US$1.1 billion payment that ended up in the accounts of a company controlled by a corrupt former Nigerian Oil Minister, the Dutch government is coming under increasing pressure to stop supporting opt-outs in new EU legislation that would enable companies such as Shell to avoid having to publicly report these payments in certain circumstances.

As The Guardian reports this morning:

More than a third of the subsidiaries owned by major energy and mining companies including Shell, BP and Glencore are based in “secrecy jurisdictions” where company accounts are not publicly available, according to a report. The study by Publish What You Pay Norway, which campaigns for transparent accounting among oil, gas and mining giants, claims that populations in resource-rich countries are losing out because they are unable to extract financial information from businesses operating on their soil or off their seaboards. “Extractive industry giants’ corporate ownership structures, their use of secrecy jurisdictions and the...

Better transparency in the extractive industries is essential, but, in all sectors, multinationals take advantage of the secrecy offered by the opaque financial system to avoid contributing to the societies from which they benefit. For this reason, country by country reporting must become a mandatory requirement for multinationals in all sectors – and for oil company executives like Peter Voser to attack such transparency suggests not only being out of touch with the political times, and indeed his own company’s position, but also a lack of concern for some of the poorest people on the planet. Wednesday, the Financial...