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7 J. World Energy L. & Bus. 1 (2014)

handle is hein.journals/jlowdeylw7 and id is 1 raw text is: Journal of World Energy Low and Business, 2014, Vol. 7, No. 1 Introduction to the special issue on fiscal transparency John Gault* Recent events have brought fiscal transparency to broad public attention: * Announcements by the USA,1 UK and France2 of plans to commence compliance with the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI); * Proposals3 by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to implement Title XV of the Dodd-Frank Act, proposals which were later remanded by a US District Court;4 and * Publication of the EU Directive on Accounting and Transparency.5 Negotiators of energy industry contracts, for whom this Journal is published, need to be aware of how compliance with new transparency rules will affect our industry, and in particular how compliance may impact relationships between international investors and host governments. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been focusing on the subject of fiscal transparency for some time. Transparency International and Global Witness were both founded in 1993. Global Witness, in 1999 and 2002, published investigative reports on alleged corruption and mismanagement of oil revenue in Angola, bringing fiscal trans- parency issues to an even wider audience.6 Many NGOs, including Transparency International UK, Global Witness and Open Society Institute, collaborated on the for- mation of the network Publish What You Pay (PWYP) in 2002. Simultaneously, in the 1990s and early 2000s, a considerable body of academic litera- ture on the subject of the 'resource curse' identified corruption and the siphoning off of resource revenue to the private wealth of elites as serious obstacles to economic devel- opment. At the same time, corporations came under pressure from shareholders and other stakeholders to devote increased attention to corporate social responsibility. Stakeholders demanded, among other things, greater insight into companies' relations with host governments, particularly in countries where human rights appeared to be violated. Geneva's Graduate Institute, Email: johngault@bluewin.ch. 1 September 2011. 2 May 2013. 3 August 2012. 4 July 2013. s June 2013. 6 Global Witness, 'A Crude Awakening: The Role of the Oil and Banking Industries in Angola's Civil War and the Plunder of State Assets' (1999) <http://www.globalwitness.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/A%20Crude%2OAwakening.pdf> accessed 20 Januray 2014, and 'A Crude Awakening' (1999), 'All the President's Men' (2002) <http://www.globalwitness. org/library/all-presidents-men> accessed 20 January 2014. © The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the AIPN. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/jwelb/jwt032 1

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