Bono backs oil measure in Wall St. law

U2 lead singer and anti-poverty activist Bono is cheering the oil
revenue transparency provision tucked into the big Wall Street
reform law, calling it the “kind of daylight that makes the cockroaches
scurry” and urging adoption of similar rules elsewhere.
He’s calling attention to the measure as the United Nations convenes a
major development summit.

“I’m pleased to give you an update on
an intervention that some of us thought of and fought for as critical:
hidden somewhere in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill (admit it …
you haven’t read it all either) there is a hugely significant
‘transparency’ amendment, added by Senators Richard Lugar and Benjamin
Cardin. Now energy companies traded on American exchanges will have to
reveal every payment they make to government officials. If money changes
hands, it will happen in the open. This is the kind of daylight that
makes the cockroaches scurry,” Bono wrote in a weekend
New York Times op-ed.
Bono’s piece is about
strategies for meeting global development targets, and it ran ahead of
this week’s United Nations summit in
New York City on the 2015 Millennium Development Goals.
Sens.
Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and Ben Cardin (D-Md.) won a measure in the Wall
Street law approved months ago that forces many oil and mining companies
to provide the Securities and Exchange Commission information on
payments to foreign governments for production licenses and other
aspects of energy and mineral projects.
Advocates of the
disclosure — including Bono — say increased transparency of payments
will help reverse the “resource curse” in which some energy- and
mineral-rich nations in Africa and elsewhere are plagued by high levels
of corruption, conflict and poverty.
Bono alleges that some
multinational oil companies “knowingly participate in a system of
backhanders and bribery that ends up cheating the host nation and
turning what should be a resource blessing into a kind of curse of
black-market cabals.”
Lugar and Cardin are happy about Bono’s praise; both
flagged it Monday via Twitter.
http://washingtonscene.thehill.com

source : http://u2ol.net