© AP/THIBAULT CAMUSEarlier this month, the Trump Administration made it substantially easier for American oil and gas companies to hide their financial dealings.
Months ago, in one of his first official acts as president, Donald Trump
approved a measure repealing a requirement that mandated American oil and gas majors disclose how much money they had given to foreign governments.
The measure, in essence, would have forced companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil to disclose if they were bribing corrupt, authoritarian governments overseas.At the time, Trump's move was met with widespread condemnation from pro-transparency groups. For Global Witness, an international NGO, the repeal represented an effort to "enable the corruption President Trump told us all he would end," with the decision "pos[ing] a grave threat to U.S. national security." A
statement from Publish What You Pay, a group of civil society organizations that pushes for financial transparency, described the repeal as a "retrogressive step for oil, gas and mining industry transparency and for the global battle against corruption."
The administration, however, paid no mind to those concerns and repealed the regulations anyway.
Since then, things have only gotten worse.
Earlier this month, with little fanfare, the administration
announced that the United States would also be pulling back from commitments to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a consortium that, as Reuters described, "sets a global standard for governments to disclose their revenues from oil, gas, and mining assets, and for companies to report payments made to obtain access to publicly owned resources."
The extraction sector is still widely considered the most corrupt industry in the world, and the EITI - supported by more than 50 countries and
the former Obama Administration - remains one of the foremost groups tasked with ending trans-national corruption.
Comment: Because the people being stolen from were Russian, we can expect silence from the MSM on this egregious and politically motivated swindling.