April 29, 2008

Force oil companies to adopt EITI principles in order to list and trade

Sir as a cursed citizen from an oil cursed nation (I guess you have never really seen a cursed government from an oil cursed nation) I do applaud your editorial "Fighting graft" since you there clearly state that if persuasion and coercion do not exist, nothing will happen any century soon. 

I for one am begging the developed countries to have their financial and commodities exchanges to ask for evidence of compliance with a set of minimum practices along the lines of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, before any oil company is allowed to list or trade on them. 

That of course would do infinitely more than having to spend our next hundred years trying to convince individual companies and countries of the merits of such initiative.

That of course does not mean that I am in agreement with EITI’s obnoxious 2nd principle that states “We affirm that management of natural resource wealth for the benefit of a country’s citizens is in the domain of sovereign governments to be exercised in the interests of their national development.”

As a citizen I know that the worst part of any oil curse is the excessive concentration in the governments of our oil revenues.