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 empty out. Season where the city tends to here to discuss 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. Im sarah at the Carnegie 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 space around the world and it interestingly combines advocacy with extremely rigorous investigations, and thats one of the things we will be talking about today, a recent report by Global Witness about shows activities in nigeria. He also helped galvanize a organizations in 40 countries he also helped galvanize a coalition of Civil Society worldwide, working for more accountability and openness in this sector. Its called publish what you pay. Sitting next to simon is the dean of columbia journalism school, and has a whole other dimension of effort in the current political space here. Among a bevy of awards, hes won no less than 2 pulitzer prizes, the first one for reporting on the securities and exchange commission, which again has some 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. Private empire. It toes you a lot, not just about the industry but an important element of u. S. Politics. A member of the human and Environmental Development agenda, and i just love that. Lets put those two together, human and Environmental Development side by side. Its in legos, nigeria, and hes 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 its in legos, nigeria, and hes an expert on the oil sector in nigeria and participated in this investigation as well as some others. Justanks again, and let me just ask your forgive come over here and join the conversation. That means like i just have to ask your forgiveness while i do this. Let me just start, simon, by asking you about this guide what 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. I can start with some boring facts. I think they say quite a lot. Many people will be familiar with the Antibribery Convention from 1999. A study of some 400 Corruption Cases. Fully two thirds of the cases they looked at involved four sectors. Guess what. The most times, the extractive sector. Most of these involved public procurement contracts. Most also included players who were from wealthy countries. I have spent Something Like corruption. I have a further twist. Which iser ask corrupt. I ask which is not corrupt. One of the things we have been doing is look at which i come into play. Were talking about how banks operate, how many flows and so on. We have to come back to some of that in the discussion later. But to actually understand the different myriad mechanisms of investigate mechanisms, we investigate. S is just the latest west africasbly largest. The history is too long to go into it the on the highlevel detail. April 2011. In netherlands the deal the problem is they had previously spent two years negotiating with the person who owned it. In april 90 april 1998 someone set up a Shell Company called malibu, basically a piece with othersgether sort of acretary was lawyer in a backstreet office, for those of you who know the breaking bad theory. That is what we were involved with. Investmentiondollar going to bed with a piece of paper. No skill set, no knowledge, no backup. They mustve known this was a stolen piece of real estate. Battleslitigation happened. Malibu lost the block. Show built it. Various litigation processes. Then we realized in the beginning there was a twoyear time with delightful court cases. One particularly noticeable is one where a former miasix wascial helping them and saido some people it was difficult to come to an arrangement where they would be happy with the amount but we are getting on much better. Effort they went through collapsed. But then that general who also happen to be a lawyer rocard the deal. Billion dollars through nasco arrangement in london run by jp morgan and the money filtered off into Shell Companies in nigeria. Where did it go . This is interesting because we required intel emails which showed the highest levels in the company were in the loop. Go onnew the money would to the highest level officials yet they went on with the details anyway. Stolen goods, they did not pay the Nigerian Government and they are now being investigated in criminal investigations throughout the countries. Reinforce something. So, you have got all of this shell with the shell arrangements, right . But, what is that they are circumventing . There is a fairly clear nigerian law, correct . It was illegal for him to give himself as nigeria as minister, nigerias largest. They could not know who he was. He was the oil minister and they dealt with them for years. As though he were the private owner . Right. Than the parent structure went after an arrangement in london. We consider that to have been a because,e creation should they pay as required through the federation accounts. The money that was going into the whole of government wouldve had to be expropriated by the official process. It couldve no longer been used to pay people. That had to create an offshore system. Toi think that is the way, belabor the obvious here, with this whole thing is about is tell me if i have this right you have Nigerian Government people assets which 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 not to go into it. That structure was created by the way in which the bill was constructed. The mechanism was created to bypass. The money was considered to be an off the back of the truck prize. So there is a question they are. This is an english expression. I apologize for that. A Bargain Basement price . Towhy would anyone want bargain a cell of price . Well, one of the things we see from in these emails is that there was a highest level discussion with an shell about how they knew there was a high likelihood the money would go on to various undetermined mechanisms to highest level officials, including johnson, who is specifically mentioned. So we have an internal discussions at high levels and they went ahead anyway. Shell shell is talking to about the fact that rather than by this asset from the nigerian people, they were going to buy it as so it were the personal property of this little Shell Company. And, by calling it the personal property of these three guys, they were able to get it wicked cheap whereas if they had had to buy it from the nigerian people, presumably the Nigerian Government would have negotiated. If it were a government acting on the behalf of its people, if it were that type of government, it wouldve put the screws into get a much higher price. It you would expect it wouldve looked after the interests of its people and sold it for the best price they could get it for. And, there are many other aspects of this that are very complicated to discuss, but in the actualy saw that someonef the asset was else. But they went through the process of trying to buy direct from malibu. Having negotiated for nearly two years and ended up concluding the detail brokered by the attorney general who used to be a lawyer. And, the arrangement they created was this offshore structure. This was not an arrangement the attorney general constructed. Designedan arrangement by the company. You been looking at well i has have Global Witness. I just wonder if you can place this story in, you know, again, you can place the story look at this in 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. Yes, it is 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 about exxon mobil and american 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. I chose exxon mobil. 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. But the poorest. One of the examples was chad. They had been there, trying to develop some rather difficult landlocked 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. And, chad is a very poor society, very unstable, subject 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 , governmentmpound officials, Civil Society activists. After a couple weeks i looked around and said, why is exxon mobil here . What are they doing here . I mean, 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 faced is that they were producing more oil every year then they were finding. They had run out of easy oil, basically. They had run out of domestic oil, they had run out of simple oil to produce, and so they were 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. Political frontiers. Because they just needed the oil. Because every 200,000 barrels a day counted trade that was the answer as to why they were in chad. That is also why they were in which oil ginny and in other places were no reasonable company would want to do business, to be honest. In equatorial guinuea and also in other places. In places 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 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 Society 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. Summary even worse that we cannot access despite the best investigators in the world. 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 in the extractive administration. Industryctive transparency initiative, which we will talk about later, is by no means a magic bullet but it is part of a suite of transparency effort that were 2000sed in the early with the support of the Bush Administration and now the Trump Administration has come in and one of its first acts of rolling back the obama era rules. To pull the plug on a transparency requirement the securities and exchange was meant to move forward and they have been signaling they are going to withdraw the United States from participation in the iti and even more advanced forms of participation than developed under 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. We tend to take them on in 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 country, but in lots of other places. If you look back to the pressures on Civil Society groups like Global Witness over the last 10 years, globally, and the space in which groups like that operate, it has been narrowing quite steadily. And now it has just pivoted off a cliff. When we talk about corruption and strategies to combat it, and the extractives, looking at the next 3 or 4 years, you have to place the question in context of a general repudiation by the United States government of a whole series of 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. Youve done some work on mobile exxon mobil 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 very key sectors, operating a colony operating like a criminal enterprise, thats majorly about the key 5 Oil Companies operated around the 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 that involves not only those but also the banks. A very includes other forces. Even sometimes the embassies. And at a part of philadelphia in within thestates, 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. It is also possible because it is such a challenging situation. That the pumps and meters were not only manage but were purchased and maintained