The Arab Spring and now the Indian Summer bids tremendous willpower for change. The rebels' complaint list against the rulers in the countries is long.
(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
This is a contribution to the «Engaged utterance» column in the weekly magazine Ny Tid, in print 09.09.2011. In the column come various idealistic organizations are speaking. The participants are: ATTAC Norway, Nature and Youth, Agenda X, Skeiv Ungdom, Changemaker, One World, The Future in Our Hands, Bellona, the Joint Council for Africa, the Norwegian Society for Nature Conservation, MSF and NOAH – for animal rights.
Join the debate on the weekly magazine's Ny Tid debate pages – send your reaction to this text to debatt@nytid.no. Preferably before 1 p.m. 14 Tuesdays to get printed in the same week's edition, Friday.
Freedom. Protests against corruption have topped the rebels' list of grievances. There is good reason for that. From Libya, we have recently been able to see spectacular photos from the Gadaffi family's many and luxurious properties, and news about large bank deposits – also in Norway – has characterized the news landscape as the dictatorship has been defeated.
As is well known, the enormous oil resources are the basis for this wealth, but how much income those in power have had from the many oil companies operating in Libya, the population does not have any special prerequisites to know anything about that.
According to Transparency International's survey "Promoting Revenue Transparency", only one of 12 large oil companies (Statoil) publicly publishes how much they pay the authorities. This picture repeats itself throughout the region. Of the 22 large companies operating in Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, only two companies publish their payments (Talisman and Statoil).
Operating in a country where the income from the business largely contributes to maintaining a dictatorship is controversial enough in itself, and the Norwegian authorities have so far not wanted to "interfere" in the debate as long as there are no international sanctions against a country.
Transparency about cash flow
As far as Libya is concerned, on the contrary, there has been great enthusiasm for Norwegian companies to establish themselves in oil-rich Libya. In 2004, the then oil and energy minister visited the country, and told Petromagasinet: "Libya is an exciting country for many Norwegian companies. I would like to be a door opener and help companies to enter the country". It has perhaps been excessively exciting for Norwegian companies in the past six months.
Unfortunately, Libya is not in a special position when it comes to the management of natural resources and corruption, which contributes to the fact that the income from the resources does not benefit the population, but instead helps to maintain corrupt regimes.
Several initiatives have been taken in an attempt to correct this – and the most important tool is transparency about the money flows in natural resource management. Several countries have now joined the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), which sets a global standard for transparency in the oil, gas and mining industry where companies are required to report payments to the state and other government bodies in the country in which they operate, and the state itself must state payments received.
In this way, the population can be enabled to hold the authorities to account and ask relevant questions about how the money from natural resources is managed and used.
Obligation to provide information
These are important steps, but can the Norwegian authorities contribute further? Transparency International has for many years advocated greater transparency in the extractive industry, and was also the initiator of EITI. Now the next step is to get legislation similar to that which has been put in place in the USA, where companies in the extractive industry are required to provide information about any payment to foreign governments, popularly known as country-by-country reporting.
Corresponding legislation will hopefully soon be introduced in the EU, and the least we should expect from the Norwegian authorities is that they further contribute to global recognition of this instrument by implementing corresponding rules as soon as possible.
The Arab Spring has emphatically demonstrated that corruption is far more than isolated cases of "white-collar crime", as we like to interpret the term in this country.
As Transparency International's director Cobus de Swardt expressed it in an article a while ago:
"Rob a bank, go to jail,
Rob a country, go to a tax haven".
(This is an excerpt from Ny Tid's weekly magazine 09.09.2011. Read the whole thing by buying Ny Tid in newspaper retailers all over the country, or by subscribing to Ny Tid - click here. Subscribers receive previous editions free of charge as PDF.)
