Najwa al-Beshti, former head of contracts at the state-owned National Oil Corporation of Libya, issued an urgent plea to Washington officials. In a recent opinion article in The New York Times, al-Beshti described how he just managed to survive the regime of Moamer Gaddafi after denouncing the shameless embezzlement of the country's oil billions.
He was demoted and suspended without pay and received death threats from intelligence officials. "America can help prevent such corruption from happening again," al-Beshti wrote in August. His piece appeared only a few days before a new regulation was issued for US and foreign companies that are registered with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to disclose how much they pay governments around the world for access to natural resources including oil.
Companies will be required to disclose payments of more than 100,000 dollars to government officials made to purchase rights to exploit oil and gas fields and to extract metals and minerals. The rule - implementing Section 1504 of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act - was intended as a mechanism for transparency. Once payments are disclosed, money can no longer flow as freely into the pockets of government officials, particularly in commodity-rich countries in Africa and other corruption-plagued developing regions.
"For anyone who thinks corruption is as big a killer as AIDS, TB, and malaria are, this is a really big deal," said U2 singer Bono, co-founder of the organisation One, which is active in the fight against poverty, famine and disease. "Transparency is the best vaccine against corruption."
The affected companies, however, do not like the new regulations at all. "US firms would lose business. US jobs would not be created. And potential revenue to our government would not be generated," John Felmy, chief economist for the American Petroleum Institute, warned before the rule was issued. The powerful lobby for the oil and gas industry represents giants including ExxonMobil and Chevron. Their concerns are simple: foreign competitors, they say, will get a good look inside US companies and use that knowledge in their fight for contracts.
Indeed, this is a game with an uneven playing field: public companies from the Arab world, for example, are often not even required to file annual reports. In Europe, efforts to improve transparency stalled, too, and the One initiative and Transparency International, an anti-corruption non-governmental organisation, blame mostly Germany for blocking all moves in that direction. Authorities in Berlin and German businesses alike reject further European regulation in this field as a competitive disadvantage.
"A responsible policy should contribute to making sure that Africa's large commodity wealth actually serves to improve its people's living standards," said Sergius Seebohm of the One campaign in Germany. Officials at the German Justice Ministry, which deals with the issue, and at the German industry federation BDI declined to comment on the SEC regulations, saying only that they were looking into the matter. The fact that Section 1504 was adopted in the United States after two years of wrangling looked like something of a miracle, a provision quietly inserted into broader, post-crisis Wall Steet reform legislation.
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