Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2013-06-11-Speech-2-603-000"
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"en.20130611.47.2-603-000"2
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"Mr President, I agree with my co-rapporteur, Mr Lehne, that these reports and this new legislation promote greater transparency and reduce the burden for SME issuers at a time of economic recession. We know that reporting requirements are essential for transparency and for investor confidence. We have been able to strike a very good balance here between reducing the administrative burden and more transparency for investors and civil society.
That is the difference that this legislation will now make. Citizens can use this data to identify payments, follow the passage into government and challenge their governments as to where the money went and what it was used for.
This is a wake-up call for legislators and businesses. This vote is history in the making. The new law will be a major new weapon in the fight against corruption, ensuring that citizens of resource-rich countries can hold their governments to account for the exploitation of natural resources.
The European Parliament has always stressed the need for country-by-country reporting for the extractive industries. In these tough negotiations with the Council and the Commission, spanning three presidencies in all, we stressed that reporting had to be meaningful and significant and had to deliver genuine transparency.
Therefore we insisted on some very tough rules. Why? Because communities in resource-rich countries have over decades seen billions of their wealth generated from oil, gas, minerals or logging robbed and squandered by corrupt governments.
They have an abundance of resources but that does not lead to wealth and prosperity. Niger has lost between EUR 14.5 billion and 21 billion of potential revenue since 1960 because of unfair extractive industry deals. In 2008 alone, African oil, gas and mineral exports were worth nine times the value of international aid: EUR 260 billion versus EUR 33 billion.
Only tough transparency rules and reporting will allow communities to follow the link between individual payments and projects. The European Parliament’s team therefore rejected the Council’s initial weak, UK Government-Rio Tinto inspired proposal. So companies now will have to report payments at country level and project level.
What does that mean? That we require companies to publish the payments they make to governments for each lease or licence that they obtain to access resources. This creates a link between a project, a mine or an oilfield and the payment.
All levels of government are defined within the rules, so payments to federal, national, regional or local governments will have to be reported. We rejected the Council’s demand that there should be exemptions from reporting rules in those countries which make it a criminal offence to disclose payments to their governments, a demand which would have rendered the entire legislation meaningless and ineffective, as corrupt countries would have used new secrecy rules to prevent disclosure.
So the new rules will enable us, to give a practical example, to deal with the kind of corruption we saw in May 2012 involving Shell and Eni in Nigeria. In May 2012 documents came to light detailing how Nigerian subsidiaries of Shell and Eni agreed to pay over one billion dollars to the Nigerian Government to acquire an oil block. On the same day, the Nigerian Government paid the exact same amount of money to Malibu Oil and Gas, owned by convicted money launderer and former oil minister, Dan Etete, who had given himself the oil block in the first place.
Shell and Eni deny paying any money to Malibu Oil and Gas, and maintain that they only had dealings with the Nigerian Government. But if Shell and Eni had been forced to disclose their payments to the Nigerian Government at project level, both companies would have been required to disclose the USD one billion payment at that time and attribute it to the oil block in question."@en1
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