Natural Resources and Violent Conflict - WaterWiki.net

76 swanson, oldgard, and lundepayments face reprisals, making it difficult for a company to act unlesscompetitors are under the same obligation. Global Witness and thePublish What You Pay campaign argue that the way forward is forhome-country regulators to require companies to report their payments.Specifically, Publish What You Pay is calling on home governmentsto require their securities regulators (for example, the Securitiesand Exchange Commission in the United States) to demand a disaggregatedreporting of payments by the host country as a condition forstock market listing. According to Publish What You Pay, mandatoryregulation would eliminate concerns about contractual confidentialityclauses preventing companies’ disclosure of payment data, noting thatsome contracts (especially in Angola) specifically allow companies toopt out of secrecy obligations if they are required to report paymentsby regulators in other countries.The campaign argues that regulation also would eliminate “doublestandards” of the way in which the same company reports about itsoperations in the developed world and in the developing world: “Weare not calling on companies to disclose commercially confidential information,but rather to publish the same basic data on net paymentsmade to government and other public authorities which they are requiredto disclose in many developed countries.” 37 Examples of specificrecommendations that Global Witness has made to oil companiesand home governments are provided in box 3.4.The Publish What You Pay campaign is the international initiativetargeted most directly at the issue of transparency of resource revenueflows in the extractive industries, although its focus is on the payment(company) side of transactions. It advocates the use of a particularinstrument—that is, mandatory requirements by securities regulatorsin home countries. The campaign appears to be gaining momentum.U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair has publicly supported the concepton several occasions, and the head of the International FinanceCorporation, Peter Woicke, endorsed the idea in a speech in September2002.A possible weakness of placing regulation in the hands of stockmarket authorities is that this could miss the important handful oftechnologically competent and internationally active companies basedin developing countries (notably China and Malaysia) that do nothave significant public listings. Such companies, which generally donot face the same “corporate social responsibility” pressures thatmany Western-based companies do from their customers and shareholders,conceivably could take business away from OECD-basedcompanies in some cases.