Tag Archives: natural resources

Guest Post: Corruption in Water Resources Management? Not Our Job Say Water-Sector Professionals

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Today’s Guest Post is by Juliette Martinez-Rossignol, a graduate student of Political Economy of Development at Sciences Po, Paris, and at the London School of Economics; Laura Jean Palmer-Moloney, a hydro-geographer and consultant with Visual Teaching Technologies specializing in wetlands ecology and hydrology; and Mark Pyman a leader in corruption prevention efforts and co-founder of CurbingCorruption.

It is hard to imagine an area where corruption has a greater impact than in the management and distribution of the world’s supply of water. Examples abound. Locally, as in the misuse of water in a municipality; regionally, as in unregulated diversions in watersheds; and globally, as in corrupt mismanagement of marine protected areas or the diversion of funds intended to combat climate change.

We asked a cross-section of those who have devoted their professional careers to managing the world’s water supply what they were doing to combat corruption in the sector.  Interviewees included engineers in water utilities in the U.S., Mexico, and elsewhere, environmental lawyers, geographers, geologists, ocean economy investors, ecosystem scientists, natural resources managers, plus water anti-corruption practitioners and journalists to.

What we found is enormously troublesome.

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Guest Post: Oversight of Beneficial Owners Can Strengthen Integrity in the Transition to Renewable Energy

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Today’s guest post is from Alanna Markle, a Policy and Research Associate at Open Ownership, and Erica Westenberg, the Governance Programs Director at the Natural Resource Governance Institute.

The transition to cleaner, renewable energy sources is crucial to the health of the planet. Yet the renewables sector is likely to face political, social, and governance challenges—including risks of corruption and conflict of interest—similar to those that have been observed in extractive industries and other sectors. One of the tools that anticorruption advocates have emphasized as crucial across sectors—transparency regarding the true beneficial owners of private companies—may be highly important in addressing corruption and conflict of interest risks in the sustainable energy transition for several reasons: Continue reading →

Fighting Corruption in Nigeria’s Forestry and Fishery Industries

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Although Nigeria is known mainly for oil and gas production, Nigeria’s agriculture sector, including forestry and fisheries, now accounts for over 21% of the country’s GDP. Despite the benefits of the forestry and fisheries industries to Nigeria’s development, corruption-fueled illicit activities in these sectors threaten to destabilize local communities and damage the environment. Two areas of illicit activity are of particular concern:

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Protecting Guyana from the Natural Resource Curse

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The ethnically-divided country of Guyana is one of the smallest and poorest countries in South America. It has a population of just 782,000 people—roughly the size of North Dakota—and its income per capita is less than $5,000 per year. But while the rest of the world faces a crippling recession, Guyana’s economy is projected to grow by 53% this year, thanks to a significant offshore discovery. (The country’s projected growth had been even higher before the recent stress in oil markets.) Guyana sold its first barrel of oil this past January, and national oil output is expected to reach 750,000 barrels/day by 2025 and 1.2mm barrels/day by 2030—more than a barrel of oil per day for each of Guyana’s 782,000 citizens.

But will this oil wealth benefit Guyana’s citizenry? Many observers worry that Guyana may fall victim to the “natural resource curse”—a paradoxical phenomenon in which resource wealth not only fails to generate sustainable economic growth but actually worsens the standard of living for most of a country’s citizens. While some manifestations of the natural resource curse are macroeconomic in nature (for example, the so-called “Dutch disease,” in which resource-driven currency appreciation stifles other tradable sectors), other versions of the resource curse involve resource wealth undermining institutions and weakening governance. Natural resource wealth, especially from point-source resources like oil, gives the political leaders who control the resource cash flows the power and opportunity to engage in various forms corruption. Not only can these leaders profit directly through kickbacks or embezzlement, but they can use resource wealth to solidify their own political power through favoritism and clientelism. In both cases, political leaders may weaken or eliminate transparency, accountability, and institutional checks that are designed to constrain their ability to improperly use resource wealth for their own personal or political benefit. These risks are greatest in countries that already have relatively poor governance and weak institutional frameworks when the resource wealth is discovered. And this corruption and institutional weakening may make ordinary citizens worse off than they were before the resource boom, even as those with connections or political power get rich.

This manifestation of the resource curse is a significant concern for Guyana, a country with political institutions that are already fragile and prone to corruption. In a winner-take-all political system with voters split along ethnic (and even geographic) lines, politicians win by favoring their base and suppressing opposition turnout. And indeed, this year’s presidential elections, conducted just two months after the country’s first oil sale, were marred by vote rigging, civil unrest, and violence. But there are also encouraging signs that the Guyanese government is taking steps to address the resource curse concern by strengthening budgetary institutions. In January 2019, the government established the Natural Resource Fund (NRF) to manage the country’s natural resource wealth. Similar to funds established in Ghana and Timor-Leste, the NRF is structured as an offshore fund that invests in liquid international securities with well-established guidelines governing fund transfers to Guyana’s Ministry of Finance. By codifying transfer rules and prohibiting fund borrowing, the NRF will compel the government—and whichever political party controls it—to save a significant portion of its oil revenue, limiting its discretionary spending abilities and curbing the corruption opportunities that arise from unencumbered financial resources.

The NRF, however, is not sufficient. While the NRF is restricted from borrowing, the Guyanese government is not. And while the NRF limits a government’s ability to withdraw more oil revenue than the NRF’s bylaws allow, the Guyana state is not forbidden from borrowing against this revenue. This loophole would allow a profligate government—especially one that intended to reward its constituents or award suspicious investment contracts—to borrow in international financial markets to fund its expenditures. Furthermore, even with the constraints imposed by NRF transfers, Guyana’s central government expenditures are projected to double from 290 billion Guyanese dollars (approximately US$1.4 billion) to 580 billion Guyanese dollars (US$2.8 billion) over the next five years. This presents ample opportunity for political leaders to leverage their power over discretionary spending to enrich and entrench themselves.

To further constrain the sort of resource-fueled discretionary spending associated with the natural resource curse, Guyana should take at least two additional steps: Continue reading →

India’s 2G Spectrum Case: The Scam That Wasn’t?

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It all started in May 2009 with a report filed by an NGO, Telecom Watchdog, with India’s Central Vigilance Commission. The NGO claimed that there were gross irregularities, likely due to corruption, in the allocation of licenses to operators for the 2nd Generation mobile communication standard spectrum (2G spectrum for short). By October 2009, India’s premier investigating agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), had opened an investigation into the allegations, and in November 2010, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India estimated the losses to the government from the alleged misconduct at a whopping US$29 billion. Indian media called it the “biggest scam in the history of Independent India.” Time Magazine put it just behind Watergate as the second worst case of abusing executive power.

Petitions were filed in the Supreme Court of India pressing for cancelling the allocation and making sure that those behind the corruption would be held responsible. In 2012, the Supreme Court obliged, canceling all 122 licenses and imposing huge fines. The Court declared that the then-Minister for Communications and Information Technology, A. Raja, had used an inappropriate allocation procedure (first-come-first-served rather than an auction) to “favor some of the applicants … at the cost of the exchequer.” In an unprecedented move, the Court also ordered the creation of a “Special Court” to try the cases, and modified regular criminal procedure by curbing intermediate challenges, in order to ensure a speedy trial. The first case was instituted against the former Minister, senior bureaucrats, and prominent businessmen for conspiring to rig the allocation process and cheat the government of revenue.

On December 21, 2017, the Special Court announced its verdict—and it was not what many had expected: The Special Court acquitted all the accused, declaring that “a huge scam was seen by everyone when there was none,” and that “some people created [the perception of] a scam by artfully arranging a few selected facts and exaggerating things beyond recognition to astronomical levels.” The Court also found that, notwithstanding the earlier 2010 report (which others had already suggested was methodologically problematic), the actual losses to the government were marginal at most.

Many commentators were stunned and dismayed by the Special Court’s decision, denouncing it as “shocking” and “flawed.” But after reading the Special Court’s decision, I find myself in agreement with the Special Court’s reasoning. While it’s impossible, in a short blog post, to wade through the merits of the Special Court’s analysis for each of its conclusions, here I want highlight some of the most important arguments in support of the Special Court’s controversial decision. Continue reading →

Why the Repeal of the U.S. Publish-What-You-Pay Rule Is a Major Setback for Combating Corruption in the Extractive Sector

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Bonnie J. Palifka, Assistant Professor of Economics at Mexico’s Tecnológico de Monterrey (ITESM) contributes today’s guest post:

Last Friday, following the U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate voted to repeal a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulation that required oil, gas, and minerals companies to make public (on interactive websites) their payments to foreign governments, including taxes, royalties, and “other” payments. The rule was mandated by Section 1504 of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, but had only been finalized last year. President Trump’s expected signature of the congressional resolution repealing the rule will represent a major blow to anticorruption efforts, and a demonstration of just how little corruption matters to his administration and to Congressional Republicans.

The extractive industry had lobbied against this rule, arguing that having to report such payments is costly to firms and puts them at an international disadvantage. Some commentators have supported their efforts, arguing, for example, that the Section 1504 rules are unnecessary because the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) already prohibits firms under SEC jurisdiction—including extractive industry firms—from paying bribes abroad. This argument misses the mark: The extractive sector poses especially acute and distinctive corruption risks, which the FCPA alone is unlikely to remedy if not accompanied by greater transparency. Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Long, Long Road from Talking Transparency to Curbing Corruption in Mauritania

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GAB is delighted to welcome back Till Bruckner, an international development expert who recently spent six months living Mauritania, and contributes the following guest post based on his experience there:

What do fish and iron have in common? Answer: Mauritania, a largely desert country of less than four million people in north-western Africa, is immensely rich in both. At the same time, most Mauritanians are poor. And one of the biggest reasons is corruption and misgovernance.

Consider first fishing. Although Mauritania has some of the world’s richest fishing grounds, its marine wealth is carried away by foreign ships whose owners often bribe senior government figures to obtain fishing permits and take their catch straight to Europe or Asia. As a result, the country has failed to develop a significant fishing industry, or domestic fish processing industry, of its own, and a fishing industry that boasts an annual catch of half a million tons generates a mere 40,000 jobs inside Mauritania. Yet to the south, Senegal translates a catch of similar size into at least 130,000 jobs, while to the north, Morocco has turned its million-ton-a-year catch into a massive export industry whose turnover is projected to reach two billion dollars by the end of this decade.

Inland, deep in the Sahara, some mountains contain more metal than rock, consisting of up to 75% iron, one of the highest concentrations in the world. Mauritania nationalized its iron mines in 1974, creating the state-owned monopoly company SNIM. Its workers blast the slopes to rubble, and conveyor belts transport the rubble into waiting railway waggons. The longest train in the world then chugs its way across 700 kilometres of desert, loads its cargo onto giant foreign freighters—and neither the ore nor most of the money paid for it are ever seen again. The looting dynamics in Mauritania’s mining sector are illustrated by the stark contrast between Zouerate, the town in the Sahara where the iron is mined—which looks like a dystopian hellhole straight out of a Mad Max film—and the rich suburbs of the capital city of Nouakchott (which produces virtually nothing), where giant villas rise out of the sand, and oversized SUVs cruise the streets. And in Nouakchott itself, in the poor suburbs, families living five to a windowless room have to pay for their drinking water by the barrel.

The preferred prescription in a situation like this (from the usual suspects: development professionals, anticorruption activists, etc.) is a combination of transparency, accountability, and civil society monitoring. But Mauritania is actually doing well on those dimensions. Continue reading →

Public Trust Theory: A Way Citizens Can Combat Resource Corruption?

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Public trust theory derives from the sovereign’s duty to act as the guardian of certain interests for the benefit of the nation as a whole. In the United States it serves as the basis for citizen suits to vindicate environmental rights, and it has been incorporated into the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights which provides in article 21 that the wealth derived from a nation’s resources is for “the exclusive interest of the people . . . [and in] no case shall a people be deprived of it.”  Could it be used by civil society to combat grand corruption in the allocation of land and natural resources?

That is the question Elmarie van der Schyff, a professor of law at South Africa’s North-West University, addresses in a new paper prepared for the Open Society Justice Initiative’s project examining how civil society can help spark more anticorruption enforcement actions.  After carefully parsing South African law governing civil suits for damages, Professor van der Schyff concludes that “public-trust theory has a supportive role to play” in helping South Africans recover damages for injuries sustained when corruption infects the distribution or use of the nation’s natural resources.  Her thoughtful analysis shows how citizens of other states can use the principles that underlie the public trust doctrine to bring damage actions too.

Professor van der Schyff’s paper is the sixth in a series commissioned by the Open Society Justice Initiative on civil society and anticorruption litigation.  It follows earlier ones on i) standing by GAB editor-in-chief Matthew Stephenson, ii) civil society litigation in India by Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy Director Arghya Sengupta, iii) private suits for defrauding government by Houston Law School Professor David Kwok, iv) private prosecution in the U.K. by Tamlyn Edmonds and David Jugnarain, and v) damages for bribery under American law by this writer.