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Lugar pushes SEC on oil payments disclosure rule
Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) is ramping up pressure on the Securities and Exchange Commission to complete delayed rules that would force certain oil, gas and mining companies to disclose payments to foreign governments.
Lugar is co-author of language in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law that imposes the requirements on companies listed on U.S. exchanges — a provision that’s under heavy attack from oil companies (click here and here for recent E2 coverage of fight over the rules).
“Transparency helps level the playing field for U.S. companies, counters the propensity of resource-rich developing countries toward wasteful spending, and combats the corruption that the World Bank has identified as ‘the single biggest obstacle to economic and social development,’ ” said Lugar, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in a speech Monday.
“Toward this end, the U.S. government should be moving forward with full implementation of the 2010 Cardin-Lugar Amendment, which requires all companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange to publish their payments to foreign governments for oil, natural gas, and mineral development. Failure to fully implement Cardin-Lugar would squander an opportunity to transform the development scenarios of resource-rich countries mired in poverty,” he said at USAID’s Frontiers in Development conference at Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown University.
The Hill's Global Affairs blog has a much wider look at Lugar's Monday remarks, including his criticism of use of U.S. development funding for climate programs.
The SEC rules are the subject of a battle that has drawn in oil-and-gas heavyweights like Exxon, which is squaring off with George Soros, Bill Gates and others.
The SEC is far past the deadline in the 2010 law to finish the rules, and the group Oxfam America recently filed a lawsuit to force the regulators to finalize the standards.
SEC Chairwoman Mary Schapiro — one of two SEC commissioners who is recused from the rulemaking — told a House committee in March that the commission hopes to complete the rule by the middle of this year.
An SEC spokesman did not provide any more information on timing Monday.
