Tag Archives: energy

Countering Corruption in the Energy Sector: After Initial Missteps, Tanzania Shows the Way

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The effects of corruption can be felt long after the incidents take place. There’s no better illustration of this than the history of Tanzania’s energy sector. In 1992, the Government of Tanzania was facing an energy crisis, and was in discussions with a Canadian company to develop its natural gas fields with funding from the World Bank. But then, the Tanzanian government received an unsolicited proposal from a Malaysian company, which offered to partner with a local Tanzanian firm to build and operate an emergency diesel-fueled power plant. The government abandoned its discussions with the Canadian company and, in 1995, signed a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with Independent Power Tanzania Limited (IPTL), a joint venture entity formed by these Malaysian and Tanzanian private interests. By 1995, however, the energy crisis had already passed, and it was not at all clear that this PPA was in the government’s interest. In fact, Tanzania’s principal energy regulation agency, the Ministry of Energy and Minerals (MEM), consistently opposed the deal. Yet parties with significant ownership interests in IPTL managed to get the PPA through, in part by bribing senior officials and politicians.

The deal was a disaster, one that had a substantial negative impact on Tanzania’s energy sector for close to two decades. (The initial corrupt deal, together with multiple other improprieties, significantly undermined the financial stability of Tanzania’s energy sector, resulting in lower investment, substantial delays in the construction of more efficient power plants, higher energy costs for consumers, and inadequate expansion of electrification into rural communities.) But, without minimizing the seriousness of the mistakes that were made or the costs that resulted from this corrupt deal, ultimately Tanzania’s efforts over the last decade to hold the corrupt actors accountable and to overhaul its regulatory system provide a roadmap for how countries that have suffered from this sort of corruption, in the energy sector and elsewhere, can respond. Continue reading →

Update from Mexico: PEMEX Reform, Private Investment, and the Government’s Anti-Corruption Gamble

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Two days before the Mexican government unveiled draft regulations for its ambitious opening of the state-run energy sector to private participation late last month, Oscar-winning director Alfonso Cuarón published a letter posing ten questions to Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.  “The reform will result in multimillion-dollar contracts” for private companies, wrote Cuarón. “In a country such as ours with a weak (and often nonexistent) rule of law, how can large-scale corruption be avoided?”  To the surprise of some, the President’s office issued a point-by-point response just a week later, naming a spectrum of anti-corruption measures adopted in the new regulations such as public bidding and agreements, disclosure of contractor expenses, a commissioner code of ethics, and institutional and procedural checks and balances unified under the oversight of the Secretary of Energy.  (Full text in Spanish here.)

The project to reform Mexico’s energy sector – particularly the state oil company PEMEX, which generates one-third of all government revenue and is bestowed of both a powerful workers union and tremendous symbolic importance in Mexican history – was always going to be controversial.  President Peña Nieto’s success in getting the law passed in December 2013 has been his signature achievement, lauded by the Washington Post as turning Mexico into “the Latin oil producer to watch — and a model of how democracy can serve a developing country.”

But both critics and many supporters of the reform recognize that corruption is an elephant in the room. Continue reading →