‘One level up’ is EITI sweet spot for beneficial ownership
This is post is cross-posted at the EITI blog As there was a lot of talk around beneficial ownership within the new EITI standard, we thought we’d try and model what it could look like. It’s one of those thorny issues. Civil society wants it, corporates often state their belief that it is a heavy more »
Working on the edge: tracking mining companies in Tanzania!
At OpenOil we’ve been engaged in the last couple of months in seeing how it is possible to use Big Data techniques to track the corporate web across the world’s oil, gas and mining companies. Part of this has involved seeing if together with our friends we can actually get into company registers in some more »
Margaret Thatcher and the North Sea Oil Bonanza
Was Thatcherism built off North Sea oil? Did the UK’s oil dividend go on dole payments in the 1980s? The numbers suggest there is at least a case to answer. Like many Brits, I suspect, I was reminded by Margaret Thatcher’s death of how ambivalent I felt about her legacy. It would be churlish not more »
A tale of two giants: SOFAZ, SOCAR and the EITI in Azerbaijan
Some time ago I wrote about my initial bewilderment at the Azerbaijani government’s touting of its EITI record, given a personal experience of the country very much at odds with everything that the EITI stands for. Of course, the debate will always come back to the troubles of a broadly successful global mechanism overburdened with high more »
The transparency lobby and the investor community: in it together.
Campaigns for the global right of access to data tend to appeal to disempowered citizens of producing nations and local journalists, with the goal of achieving a more even playing field for such marginalised groups who are missing out on the spoils of natural resource wealth. Now bear with me here, as this won’t sound more »
South Sudan is surviving without oil — barely
About a month ago, President Salva Kiir said South Sudan’s oil production would restart in a week. Famous last words, it turns out – not a drop of crude has come through the pipeline since. It’s not that there’s no urgency: at the time of the shut-down in January, the government relied on oil for 98% of more »
Petro-politics in Uganda: get-rich-quick won’t pay
What does an oil sector in its infancy look like from the inside? Our researcher Amrit Naresh is in Kampala, Uganda for three weeks working with Uganda Radio Network to launch a new wiki on Uganda’s oil. This is the first in a series of blogs he’ll post while there. At a pub Monday night more »
Oil boom coming? Ssshh – don’t tell anyone!
In 2009, a colleague of mine had an idea about how Ghana could innovate using its coming oil wealth. Being pretty well connected, he worked up some research and then flew to Accra for a meeting with the vice-president. He was heard out politely but at the end of his presentation his hosts politely informed more »
Open Letter: to the EITI companies leading the fight against transparency
To EITI board members Mr Stuart Brooks of Chevron, Mr Alan McLean of Royal Dutch Shell, Ms Elodie Grant Goodey of BP, Mr Guillermo Garcia of ExxonMobil, and Ms Baiba Rubesa of Statoil ASA: Each of your companies is a member of the American Petroleum Institute (API), which last week filed a lawsuit against the more »
Yes it is about money – a little
So maybe our interest in contract negotiation business is about money after all. Last week, I read two different figures in such different contexts that at first I didn’t think to put them together. First, while sorting out some papers I was listening to an old lecture by Jeffrey Sachs from the middle of the more »
The everyday face of Azerbaijan’s “rentier state”
There is endless theorising around the ‘resource curse’ from a birds-eye perspective, from creeping inflation rates to weak institutions and grand corruption. But on the ground in an oil-dominated society like Azerbaijan the phenomenon of ‘rent-seeking’ can lead also to a deeply embedded rentier culture visible on the level of everyday interactions.
If Dodd-Frank took so long… is US EITI in trouble?
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has finally voted on the implementation of oil and mining transparency rules in the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform bill, more than a year after the original deadline came and went. Good news, to be sure, since tough financial disclosure rules are better late than never. But the delay more »
Scraping the Barrel… 9 August 2012
Today’s barrel scrapes include: a duplicitous tale of one man against the establishment in post-oligarch Russia; oil majors deepen the Arab/Kurd fault lines in Iraq; and Robin Mills shines a light on the way forward for Indian energy security. More below…
Scraping the Barrel… 6 August 2012
Today’s barrel scrapings include: Nigeria continues its struggle with illegal refineries costing them over $1 billion a month, letters published by the KRG gives us a sneak peek into how they are wooing Big Oil, and what obstacles lay before Israel in exporting the bounty of the East Med natural gas bonanza? See below for more…
North and South Sudan: the biggest game of poker in the world
The facts are simple but brutal: in response to a dispute over pipeline fees, the world’s newest country South Sudan stopped producing oil in February because the only way to take it to market was through the pipeline to the north, through Sudan, the country they had just seceded from. Then there’s the interpretation of more »
