Time for transparency: coming clean on oil, mining and gas revenues

This report explores how, across the world, the revenues from oil, gas and mining that should be funding sustainable economic development have often been misappropriated and mismanaged. Specifically, it analyses five major examples of this problem: Kazakhstan, Congo Brazzaville, Angola, Equatorial Guinea and Nauru.The report argues that in these countries, governments do not provide even basic information about their revenues from natural resources. Nor do oil, mining and gas companies publish any information about payments made to governments. Huge amounts of money are therefore not subject to any oversight and crooked elites can extract all sorts of ‘facilitation payments’ from firms that would probably prefer not to pay bribes. Ordinary citizens, who often own a country’s resources under its constitution, are thus left without the information to call their governments to account over the management of their revenues. The end result is a litany of corruption, social decay, increased poverty, reinforcement of authoritarian government and political unrest, which can ultimately lead to state failure and the spread of instability across regions.Recommendations to increase the transparency of natural resource revenues include:all resource-rich developing countries and resource extraction companies should actively participate in the UK government’s Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and seek to voluntarily disclose their revenues from resource extraction. However, voluntary disclosure will not work everywhere that transparency is most needed because many political and business elites have a vested interest in avoiding transparency to protect their illicit profitsa set of joined-up policies is needed to make resource extraction companies publish what they pay to governments on a country-by-country basis and to make host governments publish what they earnsimple adjustments to existing policies of company disclosure, ‘books and records’ provisions in anti-corruption legislation, and international accounting standards can be used to require multinational companies to ‘publish what they pay’export credit agencies, bilateral and multilateral bodies, and banks should make all their lending