Extract-A-Fact – Oil Company Data on Payments to Governments is Now Coming Thick and Fast
By Joseph Williams, Natural Resource Governance Institute This post originally appeared on www.resourcegovernance.org on June 13, 2017
Statoil became the first companyto report under a mandatory payment disclosure regime in early 2015, undermining U.S. oil lobby arguments. Shell, which had fought so vigorously against project-level payment disclosure laws, published its first payments to governments report under U.K. law in April 2016 and included information on China and Qatar, countries it previously claimed prohibited disclosure. BP, which had barely published any country specific information (save for seven EITI countries, often with huge time lags), reported on USD 15.2 billion worth of project-level payments in 23 countries in June 2016. These disclosures were exciting, and staggered. Over the last fortnight, similar reports have poured in.