Workshop: From the Underground to the Sunlight. Ensuring Transparency of the Extractive Wealth

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Abstract:

The well-known phenomenon of the “Resource Curse” is driven by corruption. Instead of bringing wealth and bright prospects to its people, such resources as oil and gas often lead to conflict, poverty and injustice. The responsibility for changing this curse into blessing lays on host governments as well as businesses and their home governments. It is the whole purpose of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative to bring all stakeholders to the table in a voluntary, country-driven process. After a worldwide campaign led by Publish What You Pay, the voluntary EITI process has recently been complemented by a US piece of legislation requiring country-per-country disclosure of local payments from all corporations listed or active in Wall Street. It is now time to take stock of those achievements and explore dynamic ways of making corporations and governments accountable to the public as a whole.

Since 2006, Transparency International in partnership with Revenue Watch Institute and other civil society organisations has been leading the Promoting Revenue Transparency project. TI has focused on the corporate information flow, and RWI has focused on the governmental one. Corporations have to prevent corruption, and the financial flows to the general budget have to be public. The use of the funds as well is to be known, which means that budgetary processes of resource-rich countries have to be transparent and managed in an accountable manner.

Moderator: François Valérian, Head of Private Sector, TI

Rapporteur: Katharina Gunselmann, GTZ

Speakers:

Eduardo Bohorquez, managing director, TI Mexico
Peter Eigen, chair, EITI
Juan Carlos Quiroz, Revenue Watch Institute
Baiba Rubesa, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility, Statoil
Radhika Sarin, International Coordinator, Publish What You Pay
T. Negbalee Warner, Ministry of Finance, Liberia
Gabriele Zöller , Governance; Democracy; Rule of Law, Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, BMZ

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