Remarks part of a formal response to citizen grievance letter from Oxfam, Publish What You Pay, and other organizations
Oxfam welcomed a statement from Fredrik Reinfeldt, the chair of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) and former prime minister of Sweden denouncing ExxonMobil and Chevron for their unprecedented refusal to publicly disclose their US tax payments. The official remarks from EITI, the leading global initiative for good governance in the oil and mining sectors, comes as ExxonMobil and Chevron hold their annual general meetings with shareholders.
The statement is a formal response to a citizen grievance letter from Oxfam, Publish What You Pay, and other organizations calling for the removal of ExxonMobil and Chevron from the EITI board based on the companies’ opaque and unethical operating procedures. The letter details how the two companies flouted the EITI’s basic transparency requirements and sabotaged US oil transparency rules, leading to the derailment of the US government’s implementation of the EITI standard. As EITI board members, both ExxonMobil and Chevron are required to support full implementation.
“We welcome the chair’s denouncement of ExxonMobil and Chevron and agree that they violated the EITI standards when they refused to play by its rules,” said Isabel Munilla, Policy Lead for Extractive Industry Transparency at Oxfam America. “ExxonMobil and Chevron seem more willing to embarrass themselves publicly by flouting the EITI rules, than to tell citizens how much they paid in tax to the US government. They even lobbied for the repeal of US oil transparency regulations that would force them to disclose,” Investors and citizens should be asking, what do they have to hide?”
Investors representing nearly $12 trillion in assets have supported US oil and mining transparency regulations as laid out in Section 1504 of the Dodd-Frank act. Under Section 1504, US-listed companies must disclose tax and other payments made to governments as part of their regular required reporting to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Following intense lobbying from ExxonMobil and Chevron, the implementing rules for Section 1504 were repealed by Congress in February 2017 and signed into law by President Trump. Despite the repeal, Section 1504 remains in force and the SEC must produce a new rule.
“When it comes to transparency, ExxonMobil and Chevron risk falling behind the global curve,” said Munilla. “Thirty countries have rules similar to those in Section 1504 in force and major competitors like Shell, BP, and Total, as well as state-owned companies such as Russia’s Gazprom and Rosneft, are now in their third year of reporting. Investors increasingly expect transparency and are dissatisfied with the level of reporting from ExxonMobil and Chevron.”
“Oxfam joins investors in calling for transparency,” said Munilla. “As ExxonMobil and Chevron report to investors on their massive earnings expected from the new tax reform, US citizens deserve to know how much exactly will be flowing into the US government budget.”
/ENDS
Editor’s notes:
- Citizen grievance letter: http://www.pwypusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/CONFIDENTIAL-USEITI-Grievance-Letter.pdf
- EITI response to citizen grievance letter: https://eiti.org/document/statement-in-response-to-useiti-grievance-letter