Ladies and gents, thank you very much for coming. First of all, we are into the season where the city tends to empty out and so we are all really delighted that you are a problem that is arguably as important here in the United States as it is around the world where we will be free hope focusing on it. Let me introduce myself and we will be conversing with. Carnegie at the endowment for international peace, and the democracy and rule of law program, not the climate and energy program. Simon is going to kick us off, simon taylor, whose one of the founders of Global Witness, which is in my view one of the most innovative and effective organizations working in this around the world and it interestingly combines advocacy with extremely rigorous investigations, and thats one of the things we will be talking byut today, a recent report Global Witness about shows activities in nigeria. He also helped galvanize a coalition of Civil Society organizations in 40 countries worldwide, working for more accountability and openness in this sector. Its called publish what you pay. Is the next to simon dean of columbia journalism , and has a whole other dimension of effort in the current political space here. Wong a bevy of awards, hes no less than 2 pulitzer prizes, the first one for reporting on the securities and exchange has somen, which again real relevance here. Hes also the author of private empire, which is a read that i recommend all of you, when youre done with this, go out and buy private empire. It tells you a lot, not just about the industry, but quite an important element of u. S. Politics at the moment. The human and Environmental Development agenda, and i just love that. Lets put those two together, human and Environmental Development side by side. And hesegos, nigeria, an expert on the oil sector in nigeria and participated in this investigation as well as some others. So thanks again, and let me just come over here and join the conversation. Means like i just have to ask your forgiveness while i do this. Let me just start, simon, by whatg you about this guide caused you and Global Witness to really feel like this was such a critical subject to investigate . Thats a good question. There were a few other people who knew but i will come to that in a second. If i can start with some very boring stats many of you will antibriberywith the convention from 1999. In 2014, they did a study of some 400 Corruption Cases which looked at the period of operation of the convention. And fully 2 3 of the cases they looked at involved just four factors. The one featured the most time instructive sector. Constructive sector. Players fromcluded wealthy countries. Quitek we can participate a lot about that. I spent the last three years looking at corruption in the mining sector. A twist that refines, for me at least, the extractors as the most corrupt sector. Everywhere we look, in certain wheres, i no longer asked is the corruption. Its more which concession is not corrupt. That the true situation. I would say there are certain members of the oil industry who i view now as corrupt because everywhere we find them, theyve been involved in corrupt deals. One of the things we been doing in this past 20 year period has been on the one hand to understand how corruption works and then look at policy prescriptions that might come to play along with other prescriptions, because were not just talking about the oil industry, were talking about how banks operate, how monies flow internationally. We can come back to that, in that discussion about solutions later. Actually to understand the different. Matters of corruption, we have to investigate. This is just merely the latest development, in our work on this case study in nigeria called opl 245. It is west africas largest oil block. Essentially, it was a deal concluded in april 2011, in the u. S. Ll, listed in but also in the u. K. And the netherlands, together with its 245. Ament, acquired they had spent two years directly negotiating with the person who earned it, which was none other than the former nigerian to tater. 1998ctator, who in april set up a Shell Company called malibu, basically a piece of paper which consisted of him as the owner, hidden by a false name. Company wasy of the a Better Call Saul lawyer in the backstreet office. Basically they were prepared to invest in nigerias largest oil block, a multibilliondollar investment essentially going to bed with a piece of paper. No skill set, no knowledge, no backup for it they must have known this was a stolen piece of real estate of the nigerian state. Various, various litigation battles have been. Plot, shellede audit, shell lusted and malibu got it back. Various litigation went on. Then we arrive at 2009. In the beginning of the negotiation over a twoyear period, with delightful emails what come out from that period which come out of court cases, one particularly notable is one where a former mi6 official, who was helping them, mr. Bonds company would probably be familiar, writing to some people further up the chain. Of, itseffect difficult to come to an arrangement where he will be happy with the amount. An interesting sort of color in the way things were preceded. The initial effort they went through to struck this deal collapsed. In the end, the thennigerian attorney general, who also happen to be a former lawyer, brokerdeal apart. When it considered that consisted of was the bipartisan of the treasury, through the net grow arrangement, run by jpmorgan. The money then filtered off into a series of other Shell Companies in nigeria, and went home where did it go . We acquired some intel emails which showed the highest levels in the country in shell, and for that matter we can include any as well, the money they knew was going to go on to highest level officials and yet they went to have a deal anyway. Shell is in possession of stolen goods, they didnt pay the Nigerian Government for these assets, and they are now being investigated in criminal investigations in multiple countries. Let me reinforce something here. So you got all of this shell with the shell arrangements, right . But what is it that they are circumventing . Theres a fairly clear nigerian law, correct . Theres multiple laws. It was illegal for him to give self as though he were the private owner. The current structure they wed in the deal consider that to have been a deliberate creator. Had they paid is tutionally required it would have to have been appropriated. What this whole thing is about tell me if i have this right, you have Nigerian Government and people assets which it by nigerian law, the payment for it needs to go into the Federation Account which is like the federal budget, right . And they directed that payment the structure was created by the deal that was constructed. Essentially a mechanism was created to bypass. Lets put this in context. Billion dollars, which we consider to be an off the back of the truck prize because we know shells internal estimates were higher, so there was a question there. . A Bargain Basement price . . A Bargain Basement price. Why would anybody from the governments perspective want to bargain a selloff price . See frome things you these emails, reports here that they there was a high level discussion within shell about how they knew there was a high likelihood through some determined mechanisms to highest level officials, including good luck jonathan, who is specifically mentioned. We have internal discussions so that money would go on. Shellll is talking to about the fact that rather than by this asset from the nigerian people, they are going to buy it as if they were the personal property of this little shell , and by calling it the personal property of these three guys, they are able to get it wicked cheap whereas if they had to buy it from the nigerian people, presumably the nigerian would have negotiated, if it were a government acting on behalf of its people, if it had been that type of a government that it would have been putting the screws into get a much higher price. You would expect they would look out for the interests of the people and the best price i could have gotten that far. In 2011 we have a different price construct and we have today. There are many other aspects. Saw the actualy holder of the asset the went to bat in protest. And ended up concluding a deal brokered by the attorney general. The arrangement they created was this offshore. That wasnt an arrangement the general constructed. This was an arrangement designed by the company. Well ibeen looking at has have Global Witness. I just wonder if you can place again,ory in, you know, you look at a number of other countries. Is this an aberration . Is it relatively typical . What are we dealing with in this sector . Its a fascinating case and it sounds like it will go on for a while. We will probably learn more as investigations by judicial authorities proceed. As part of a much larger picture, as simon alluded to. Thought i would mention a couple of points of context, may, for my own reporting. Sarah was kind enough to mention private empire, its a book and americanobil foreignpolicy was the idea. I started out just to write about the geopolitics of oil in the age of constraints, the age of Climate Change, the age of increased competition, and i got out and did research and thought, i dont have a story here. I had no idea what i was getting into. It seemed like a good subject at the time, and so then i made a map of where exxon mobil produced its oil. I was interested in the distortions created by wealthy, Global Corporations extracting oil in very, very poor societies. Not even just developing societies. They had been there, trying to develop some rather difficult landmark oil that had difficult geological characteristics, was a long way from the ocean. Nigerias recurring scene of these kinds of crimes because nigerian oil is very appealing, its right near the ocean, its very easy to get to market, its sweet crude, and it produces well. But chads oil is difficult oil. Chad is a very poor society, very unstable, subject to coup attempts repeatedly. I flew in and i was starting to report, i drove down to the oil area, talked to people who live down there, people who worked on the compound, government officials, Civil Society activists. After a couple weeks i looked around and said, why is exxon mobil here . They are producing a few hundred thousand barrels of oil a day in a consortium, that this is really difficult territory. Its politically unstable. Why is it necessary to be here doing this business . Theres an interesting, important answer. One of the dilemmas, at least until the shale revolution, Big Oil Companies phase was that they were producing more oil every year than they were finding. And they had run out of easy oil, basically. They had run out of domestic oil , they had run out of simple oil wereoduce, and so they going further and further into difficult frontiers, both difficult production frontiers like the arctic, where there were high risks, and difficult engineering challenges, but also difficult clinical frontiers. They just needed the oil, every 200,000 barrels a day counted trade that was the answer as to why they were in chad. Its also why they were in the placesl ginny and in where no reasonable company would want to do business, to be honest. That pressure on global Oil Producers remains. There are Technological Breakthroughs that can take you away from Political Risk and bring you into a different kind of risk like drilling in deep water or hostile, cold climates, but thats a fundamental piece of context for this constant interaction between wealthy companies and poor societies. I want to stop you on that and say, reading private empire, this was a transformational thing for me about the book, understanding this business model. Its about proving to your shareholders that for every barrel of oil you sell, you found a new one. Because who would want to buy shares in a supermarket that only has as much milk is on teh shelf. That pressure was especially strong around the time i was working on this, but yes. Thats it. The other thing you have to understand, and im sure you run into this, and it is putting bribery cases like involving shell, and maybe more shell than any into it, into a larger context, if you look at a list of the 20 largest Oil Companies in the world, 18 of them are stained own state owned. Owned by russian entities, by china, by india. Its an exception, exxon mobil, to be fully privately controlled to the extent that you consider exxon mobil independent of the United States, they see themselves as independent of the United States. What interesting about what simon and folks do, and we will get to this in the solutions part, the very fact that these companies are accountable to stakeholders other than governments that own them actually creates a point of leverage. They have different vulnerabilities, there have shareholders, securities and Exchange Commission, civil ,ociety groups they meet with whereas rosner doesnt feel those pressures. Its a complicated structure to think about trying to change because you have all these privately Held Companies that feel, why are we the guinea pigs for a global government system that doesnt touch our state owned competitors. It also means theres probably quite a lot of these transactions. So, i would say the u. S. , the last point i wanted to make by way of context is that i think important to say out loud that this administration, unlike the last republican administration, is actively departing from transparency as a solution to corruption. Industriesive transparency initiative, which we will talk about later witches by no means a magic bullet but it is part of a suite of transparency efforts that were early to in the thousandss with the support of the bush administration, and now the Trump Administration has come in and one of its first acts of rolling back obama era , pull the plug on a transparency requirement the securities and Exchange Commission was meant to move forward and have been signaling they are going to withdraw the United States from participation even more, and advanced form of participation developed during the obama administration. And we will get to this i was writing something yesterday about journalism in these times. One of the things that occurred to me, piecing through some details and this isnt surprising, maybe not that interesting. I think of the practical matter, all these rights and norms are intertwined. Intend to take them on silos, whats happening to environmental regulation, whats happening to pressure attacks on professional journalism, whats happening to transparency. Whats happening to Civil Society, not just in this luncheon but in lots of other places. You look back to the pressures on Civil Society groups like Global Witness over bally, and0 years, glo the space in which groups like that operate, it has been narrowing quite steadily. Offnow it has just pivoted a cliff. When we talk about corruption and strategies to combat it, and the extractives, looking at the you have toyears, place the question in context of a general repudiation by the United States government of a whole series of her jeans comparable to transparency. This is a real departure, a departure, just to put a punctuation mark on it, its a departure from the republican partys conspiracy. We are to circle back on a number of these points. Some work on mobile in nigeria, havent you. What have you been working on . Its important to detain in which the oil industry thats what i wanted to get that. Youre on the receiving end of a lot of these practices. Tell us what it feels like to be working with people who are on the ground where this extraction is taking place. I get a little bit worried, listening to the United States is actually pushing around the area of transparency and accountability. Coming from a background where you have seen the capacity of operating as, colony operating like a criminal , thats majorly about the key 5 Oil Companies operated world, sometimes nondeclaration of the leasing of this oil. This is a country where it is possible for 200,000 barrels of crude oil to disappear on a daily basis, either to the sea or the port. What does that look like . Can you help us picture, imagine what does it look like on the ground, and how is it possible for 200,000 barrels of oil just to walk away . It is so possible. We also need to understand is how you would also link with chevron in chad, what is the connection . And, the level of corruption with countries, you would see the recent report showing nigeria, south africa, one of the leading countries actually affected within african culture. It is not only about those countries on the ground, or characters. It is about also the conspiracy including the banks. It includes even sometimes the embassies. At the port of philadelphia in the United States, within the period of 2011 and 2014, crude iol was about 12 billion. Actually was underreported or none reported, moved from nigeria to the port of philadelphia. Just within that period. Because itpossible is such a challenging situation. Manage created by the Oil Companies, records are kept by the Oil Companies. So the oil managing company in , only in what is reported by the Oil Companies. So there is a period in the history of nigeria where we have the most kleptocratic leadership in that country, within th