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Dear all,

This week we have experimented with a multi-lingual newsletter. You can access the French, Spanish and Portuguese versions of this newsletter online.

Please let us know what you think, we’d be keen to hear any suggestions or thoughts you may have – as well as whether you think this is something we should do on a more permanent basis.

Español

Esta semana nos hemos atrevido con un boletín de noticias multilingüe. 

No duden en enviarnos sus comentarios; nos encantará recibir las recomendaciones u opiniones que puedan tener y saber si creen que deberíamos mantener esta iniciativa de un modo más continuado.

Boletín de noticias en Español

Français

Cette semaine, nous avons décidé de nous livrer à une expérience avec une newsletter plurilingue. 

Merci de nous dire ce que vous en pensez. C'est avec plaisir que nous recevrons toutes suggestions ou réflexions de votre part. Dites-nous aussi si vous estimez si cette expérience plurilingue mérite de devenir systématique.

Accedez à la version française.

Português

Esta semana estamos testando uma newsletter multilíngue.

Por favor, diga-nos o que achou. Gostaríamos de ouvir as sugestões ou opiniões que possa ter e também se acredita que deveríamos fazer isso de forma mais permanente.

Newsletter em Português. 

Sometimes it can be hard to explain just why transparency in the extractive industries is such a vital – and fascinating – issue. Talking about “financial this” and “contract that” can make people reluctant to engage with the topic. 

Yet our cause is a very important one and over the past year we’ve been trying to use different ways to communicate our message.  We’ve realised that what we really want is to get to the human story behind our campaign and convey why people campaign so tirelessly on this issue.

To this end, we’ve interviewed several of our activists from around the world, asking them why they fight for transparency. Visit our site to see all of these stories mapped out. We’ll be regularly adding interviews to this map over the next few weeks, and indeed months, so keep checking back in.

Explore the map 

From presidential coups to new constitutions, our second documentary on Niger (our first is here) offers a quick snapshot of the political environment Publish What You Pay activists have faced over the past few years. It focusses on how the debate over natural resources has evolved, the treatment of Publish What You Pay activists under President Tandja’s autocratic regime and their role in establishing a new level of openness in the country – notably enshrining natural resource transparency as a key principle in Niger’s new constitution. The video also demonstrates a key feature of PWYP as an international solidarity network, which pulls together when the lives of its members are threatened. You can find out more on PWYP’s coordinated response to the arrests here.

It was filmed by Fat Rat Films and is in French with English subtitles.

You can view the video on our site or on our youtube channel.

Today the Publish What You Pay coalition together with Friends of the Earth Europe launched a Europe-wide advert in the Financial Times calling on the European Union to seize a historic opportunity to pass European transparency laws for oil, gas, mining and logging companies.

The laws would ensure that citizens and investors are able to benefit from greater transparency in natural resource deals struck between companies and governments around the world.

The advert was written as a ‘Letter to Europe’ and urges key European decision makers to adopt strong transparency laws in the face of fierce opposition from the oil industry.

So much is at stake. If oil, gas, mining and logging companies published the payments they make to each government around the world and for every project, citizens would be empowered to track those financial flows to ensure taxes, royalties and other payments are used to benefit the whole country, rather than a select few. Investors would be able to assess risk more accurately with this data too.

Known as the European Accounting and Transparency Directives, these laws will play a huge part in opening up an industry which has for too long been shrouded in secrecy.

... click here to read the rest of the blog

WASHINGTON – The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has denied an oil industry request to delay implementation of landmark U.S. transparency regulations. The SEC rejected the request by the American Petroleum Institute (API), the U.S.

Chamber of Commerce and others, to stop implementation of oil and mining payment disclosure rules until their lawsuit to overturn the regulations is heard in court. The rules implement Section 1504, known as the “Cardin-Lugar Amendment” of the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, and require US-listed companies to publish payments to US and foreign governments as part of their annual reports.

“We commend the SEC for blocking the oil industry’s assault on transparency,” said Isabel Munilla, Director of Publish What You Pay US. “The United States is setting a global standard that must be protected from companies that want to push us back to an era where their tax payments to the US and foreign governments are kept secret. The SEC has made clear that their frivolous claims have no basis.”

API – whose leading members include Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, Statoil, Total and other oil majors –and its co-plaintiffs claimed that without delay of the rules, they would face immediate and irreparable competitive harm. In its decision, the SEC found these arguments “too speculative and unsupported by evidence to warrant a stay.”

… read the rest of the press release here

• We’ve updated the PWYP Indonesia page on our website with their latest activities 
• Partnership Africa Canada launched its report Reap What You Sow: Greed and Corruption in Zimbabwe’s Marange Diamond Fields. (PAC are the hosting organization of Publish What You Pay Canada)  For more about the report read this blog 
• Reserve and resource disclosure rules have been finalised for Australian Securities Exchange-listed mining and oil and gas companies.

Bordering Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and China, and one of the poorest ‘stani’s’, Tajikistan has the world’s tallest flagpole rising 165 meters in the air which landed the country its only entry in the Guinness Book of World Records .  As of last week however Tajikistan has the honour of joining yet another global standard when the President re-affirmed its commitment to implement the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative during a conference held in Dushanbe on November 13 and 14.  It was interesting to note however that it was only in the second statement that the Deputy Minister for Finance referred to the three parties in the multi-stakeholder initiative; in the first shorter version he omitted civil society.

And civil society was arguably the heaviest represented in the conference room: we had PWYP civil society coalition members from Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and emerging coalition members from Ukraine and Tajikistan.  They were not only attending the EITI conference but also the eighth PWYP Eurasia Regional Meeting that immediately followed.  The PWYP regional meeting discussed the future of the EITI where once again the following recommendations were endorsed .  Civil society members got an update from EITI CSO board member  Dorjdari Namkhaijantsan on the proceedings in Lusaka and plotted on their strategy for the coming months to convince their MSG constituencies at national and international level of the urgency of contract transparency and project-by-project reporting.

A large amount of time was set aside to discuss how to take forward the new PWYP Strategy Vision 20/20 within the Eurasia context. PWYP coalitions started to draft action plans and shared this with each other. While a full report including these national action plans will become available in the coming weeks, there were two very clear recommendations for the PWYP International Secretariat. Firstly the need for a Russian-speaking regional coordinator based in the region and secondly the need to help coalitions access funding at national, regional and international level.  

... read the rest of the blog here

Joint lobbying by Iraqi civil society organisations, led by the Iraqi Transparency Alliance, resulted in the Iraqi EITI Multi-Stakeholder Group modifying its laws on CSO representation.

Earlier this summer, the Iraqi EITI had approved a draft regarding its organisational bylaws which restricted the type of CSO that was eligible to run for the MSG elections. These conditions were biased against any CSO/NGO that received foreign financial support, thus eliminating a large number of active civil society organizations in Iraq from the running. Although the EITI requires the participation of civil society in its implementation, the selection process of civil society representatives for the national MSG level has proven problematic.

The Iraqi coalition raised their concerns about these bylaws to their CSO representatives on the MSG. While one representative was supportive, the other two claimed that these bylaws had been requested by a large number of Iraqi CSOs.  Sensing that this might not be the case, the Iraqi Transparency Alliance called for a general meeting on November 10th to discuss the new bylaws and how to push for their modification. Their argument was that EITI requirements stress the fact it is up to the CSOs to set their own rules and regulations regarding the MSG election process of the CSO representatives.

118 national Iraqi CSO met with the national coordinator of the MSG and discussed the bylaws pertaining to their election process. After four hours of debate and discussion, they produced a list of recommendations to present to the MSG.

The Iraqi MSG met on the 12th of November and adopted these recommendations, modifying their bylaws for CSO representation according to the list of recommendations. This decision represents a victory for Iraqi civil society organisations campaigning for a better say in the management of their natural resources.