Today, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced a landmark transparency rule which requires U.S.-listed oil, gas and mining companies to publish details of their payments to governments for the right to exploit a country’s natural resources. The rule, which follows more than 16 years of campaigning by Global Witness and our Publish What You Pay-US allies, has been celebrated by human rights and transparency advocates as a key step in curbing corruption and cutting poverty around the globe.

The new SEC measures will make it much harder to strike such deals, and enable citizens to “follow the money” generated by their country’s resources, understanding what revenue their country should be receiving in exchange for its natural wealth. The ruling requires companies to declare what they pay their governments for oil, gas and mining deals, broken down by country and by project.

Global Witness was the first organization to call for mandatory disclosure laws that would bring payments into the open... [Global Witness] was the co-founder of the Publish What You Pay campaign, which has since seen the European Union, the UK, Canada and Norway enacting transparency laws requiring companies to disclose project-level payments to governments.

…Having a common, global standard simplifies compliance for multinational companies and makes it possible for civil society to use and compare disclosures from different jurisdictions to hold their governments and the companies that exploit their resources accountable.

[Also refers to BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell]